“We had no intention of vilifying fetish or BDSM”: In Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, characters don’t die for what they do between the sheets

Background: The 70s Slasher Rule and Barker's 1986 Source

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is not only a game about demons, torture, and body horror. It also has to answer a question horror has carried for decades: when a character has sex and then dies, is the death a moral punishment?

In slasher movies of the 70s, the pattern became familiar: casual, unmarried, or untraditional sex often led to death. The source material notes that this can happen whether the creators intended it consciously or not. Because stories are usually cleaner than life, a character who explores sexuality and then is killed can look like a simple cause-and-effect lesson. That is the frame around which the new game's opening is judged.

The frame begins earlier than the game. Clive Barker wrote the original short story, The Hellbound Heart, in 1986. According to the developers, those stories are largely attributed to his experiences as a gay man in New York nightclubs and BDSM scenes in the 80s. The point, as they describe Barker's work, was not to condemn people for engaging in those practices. It was to examine the dangers of excess and irresponsible engagement with them. They describe that line as important to tow.

The historical context also matters. When The Hellbound Heart appeared in 1986, the AIDS crisis was fast becoming a known problem, even if it was not yet widely understood. The source material points out that some groups blamed gay men who had contracted the disease, claiming that their lifestyle made them responsible. That was the atmosphere in which Barker's early Hellraiser material entered horror culture.

The Game's Opening: Aidan, Sunny, the Puzzle Box, and Sunny's Death

Spoiler warning: This section reveals the game's early plot details, including Aidan, Sunny, the puzzle box, the Cenobites, and Sunny's death.

Early in Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, the player controls Aidan. One passage in the interview material also uses the spelling Aiden for the character. Aidan and his partner Sunny are already into BDSM and are trying to push the bounds of the sex they enjoy together. They discover a puzzle box. Solving it allows them to explore a new extreme of their fetish play, but when they unlock it, it summons a set of torture demons called Cenobites.

The result is brutal. Sunny is torn to fleshy pieces and sent to hell. From that violent beginning, Aidan bargains with one of the demons of torture to find a way to bring Sunny back to life and made whole.

The reviewer's aside makes the tone clear: this is no ordinary walk in the park. If the game were a stroll through the reviewer's own park, the reviewer jokes, readers would be deeply sorry, because that park is great and has a duck pond. The game's opening is far from gentle. It is a harsh starting point for a horror game based on Clive Barker's horror series.

The Developer Answer: Is Sunny's Death a Punishment?

The central question the developers address is whether Sunny is being punished for enjoying her fetish. Emil Esov, the game director, says she did not die as a punishment. In his account, there is method to what the Cenobites offer and do, and Sunny sort of willingly did it.

Antony de Fault, the narrative director, expands on the same idea. He describes the couple as fucking around and finding out, but he says the finding out is not a value judgement by the development team. He rejects the puritanical reading that a character who is into BDSM must therefore die.

Instead, the developers present Sunny's death and her interest in BDSM as expressions of a shared impulse. Esov says Sunny and Aiden both come from a place of seeking something more to fill their inner voids. They have a troubled relationship. Their sex play is probably the result of their past behaviours and past lives, and then they found each other as kindred spirits. When two people with voids they are desperate to fill come together, he says, it spirals. De Fault adds that they pursue their own annihilation because that is the type of people they are.

The developers also connect this to why Hellraiser matters. De Fault says Hellraiser is important to a lot of people because it expresses something essentially true about the neediness people experience deep down: the desire for more, the desire for greater experiences, or the desire to explore. He compares that impulse to the reason people have midlife crises.

The distinction the team draws is narrow but important. The game's problem, in their telling, is not BDSM itself. The problem is the way Sunny and Aidan indulge in their fetish play, which the developers describe as self-destructive. The demo material also includes flashbacks of the characters drinking and using drugs. The developers say the game contains interactive BDSM sequences with other characters, and those sequences are presented as healthy; those characters are pretty self-assured. De Fault says the team did not want to demonise fetish or BDSM. What is depicted as bad are unhealthy ways of engaging with BDSM, not fetish or BDSM themselves.

The developers say this distinction goes back to the origins of Barker's story. In their reading, The Hellbound Heart and the wider Hellraiser material were never simply about condemning sexuality. They were about the risks of excess, the hunger for more, and the consequences when people chase transformation without a stable sense of self.

Four Decades Later: The Same Voids, Different Cultural Coordinates

The developers are working 40 years after Clive Barker's first Hellraiser story. Esov and de Fault say the makers cannot access the same anxiety that shaped the original context, but they argue that the themes remain alive. The endless pursuit of filling voids through BDSM, or through body transformation, remains relevant. The sense of identity that can come from those experiences is still part of the story.

Esov adds a personal layer. He was born in 84. He says he grew up in the Balkans and was exposed to Hellraiser at a very young age because, in Serbia, the environment felt like a place where people were told to go into the world and experience everything, and where everything was on TV and nothing was censored. He says he became desensitised to that material in a way.

Working on Hellraiser: Revival, he says, made him reassess what he had seen when he was younger. He describes his upbringing in a patriarchal society as male-centric. He contrasts that with de Fault, whom he calls Tony, and says talking to someone who grew up in a more liberal environment opened his eyes to thinking about these things differently.

De Fault says the team also had to go further with the BDSM and fetish material because there has been so much sexual liberation since the 80s. He places the game after 50 Shades of Grey and after the mainstreaming of Pride and queer culture. He notes that queer culture overlaps with fetish culture and neurodivergent culture. He also teases topics that are probably too spicy to discuss in an interview and says he would rather let the game speak for itself.

The Demo's Bodies and Violence: Equal Pain, Equal Pleasure?

The reappraisal described by Esov and de Fault also affects what the game shows. De Fault says the team wanted to show female pain, male pain, female pleasure, and male pleasure. He says they linger on female bodies and male bodies as equally as they could.

The demo includes a clip in which Sunny sexualises Aidan, pierces his nipple, and causes him sexual pain. The material also describes scenes where he is submissive and she is dominant, and other scenes where their roles are reversed. The demo contains full-frontal male nudity as well as female nudity.

This detail matters for the article's larger question. If a horror game presents fetish play and then kills a character, the audience may ask whether the death is punishment or consequence. The developers are explicitly trying to separate the two: the consequence belongs to the characters' mutual self-destruction, not to the existence of BDSM.

Gamescom Demo: A Middle Act That Did Not Yet Prove the Thesis

The coverage is based in part on a Gamescom demo. The reviewer notes that travel and accommodation to Gamescom were provided by the conference organisers. A trailer titled Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival - Scarlet Church Trailer is also available on YouTube, and the source material carries image credits to Saber Interactive. The studio publicly associated with the game's development and publishing appears in those credits, while the details discussed here do not confirm a platform or release date.

The demo itself, as described in the source, did not necessarily communicate the themes in a polished way. The reviewer was dropped into the game in its middle act, with little context for what was happening and no familiarity with its weapons or combat. The level explored was set in a fetish club, and the reviewer fought off BDSM gear-clad cultists in a way described as hamfisted. The themes discussed in the interview were not clearly sensed during play, though the reviewer does not say they were absent.

Without the developer conversation, the demo could have been written off as a game capturing the first-person horror mood of Condemned: Criminal Origins. With the conversation, the reviewer became more intrigued because the developers appear aware of the complicated history of fetish play in horror. The question left open is whether they will do something interesting with that awareness in the finished game.

Current Stage: A Horror Game Still Being Assessed

At the point covered by this material, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a pre-release horror game still being assessed through a demo and an interview. Its public identity is tied to Clive Barker's horror series, the puzzle box, the Cenobites, and the 40-year shadow of The Hellbound Heart. Its thematic promise is to separate healthy exploration from destructive excess. Its risk is that the same opening scene that makes the game striking—a puzzle box, a BDSM relationship, a partner torn apart and sent to hell—could be misread as punishment unless the rest of the game supports the developers' distinction.

The game's current stage is therefore defined less by a launch window than by a set of arguments it has to make in play. It has the cultural weight of 1986, the slasher-era suspicion of sexual transgression, the developers' born-in-the-80s and born-in-84 perspective, the post-50 Shades of Grey visibility of BDSM and queer culture, and the practical reality of a Gamescom demo that has not yet fully shown how those themes will land. The source coverage points to a project still moving from cultural argument to playable horror, with its most important test still ahead: whether the final game can make consequence feel different from punishment.