Even before the release of Hellraiser: Judgment, writer/director Gary J. Tunnicliffe had mentioned another (early) iteration of the project titled Hellraiser into Darkness, but he didn’t provide any real details at the time other than describing it as a more traditional Hellraiser film than this year’s Judgment.

To make a long story short, Dimension wanted Tunnicliffe to make Hellraiser into Darkness, Tunnicliffe wanted to make Judgment, and the studio eventually gave in.

What would the other project have been like? He spilled some beans to Midnight’s Edge.

“I banged out a treatment titled Hellraiser Into Darkness – which I still think is a really good title,” Tunnicliffe explains. “And the story was about a psychiatric hospital, and some interns and they’ve been studying these patients who’ve got this kind of shared experience, and we discover it’s all about the Lament Configuration.”

He continues. “And the doctor who runs the institute is basically collating all of these victims so that he can create his own grimoire [a book of magic or spells] and his information about Pinhead because he wants to encounter the experiences of the Cenobites. And these interns while they’re collating the information from these victims, starts to seep into them, and it’s like that.”

From what Tunnicliffe says, the deal with Dimension was that if they didn’t like his re-written Judgment script, he had to direct Into Darkness for them… free of charge.

The rest is history.