Wow, the sad state of Nerd Culture. As people have pointed out it's "Hellraiser" seeing as they still turn out the occasional movie in that series I'm really surprised more people didn't get it. Especially seeing as it's carried comic series (fairly long running ones as far as things like this goes too) and everything else.
Now it's time to nerd out, I recommend seeing the movies though, or better yet reading the original short story first.
Hellraiser Infodump :
It all started with a horror writer named Cliver Barker who is kind of a big deal in such circles, writing a novella called "The Hellbound Heart" which is about a guy who opens a gate to hell looking for his hearts desire and winds up needless to say getting screwed. In wanting to show his stories could be adapted to the big screen he turned this story into the first "Hellraiser" movie which is pretty close to the novella verbatim. Movies based on other Clive Barker works have been a mixed bag, ranging from "Candyman" to "Lord Of Illusions" to the cult classic "Nightbreed" which was expected to be a huge success and planned franchise but didn't work out. Clive has also done cameos/quick pop ups in horror movies before including one classic moment in the cheez fest "Sleepwalkers" where him and Steven King exchange words at a crime scene in the backround in order to get fans to go "holy crap". As a result it surprises me that any nerd has not heard of Clive Barker or "Hellraiser". Education is lacking...
Clive actually didn't have much to do with the rest of the Hellraiser movies or the extended mythology. Indeed his stories draw on and referance each other to an extent, including a couple of recurring characters (like a detective with the last name D'amore, can't remember the first name, it's been a while, but he's the protaganist of "Lord Of Illusions" played by Scott Bakula... a movie which blew, and wasn't even all that close to the story it was based on which is half the problem I think). It's involved some series trope changes like where "Pinhead" who was simply called "The Engineer" in the story (though the proper name is used in some of the later movies) is made out to be a bigger deal than he was in the scheme of things.
The basic extended mythology involves the concept that there was a civil war in hell, Leviathan overthrew The Devil and decided Hell's new purpose was to bring pain and suffering exclusively, all other facets of evil and corruption were basically overlooked. This comes up in the movies in like the 4th movie where a female demon whose specialty is temptation who was on earth is kind of informed by Pinhead that there have been changes. Leviathan has also started to take mortal souls and turn them into minions rather than simply punishing the guilty like was the original purpose of Hell, and has also been pretty much working to abduct mortals rather than waiting for the wicked to come to him.
The Lamnent Configuration is basically a portable gateway, the physical form of which is a puzzle box created to a very specific configuration by a french toymaker named Lamarchond which was enchanted by a warlock to enhance his powers and summon and control demons, who himself came to a bad end. The movie "Bloodlines" which was intended to be the end of the movieverse (though they did wind up making more of them set before the futuristic finale) spells all of this out and tells the tale of descendants of that toymaker trying to build an anti-configuration to shut it down, with problems getting enough power through technological means to power something like this. This is also why "desire" matters with the cube and it occasionally displays other powers like the abillity to banish Demons/Cenboites as they go back to it's original function as a magical tool for a now-dead Warlock (he obviously wasn't going to call demons he couldn't deal with) of course since nobody knows how to use it without dumb luck you've even had situations where Demons have tossed the cube that could stop them to guys and go "hey, give it your best shot" knowing they couldn't do crap without getting very lucky.
The old Hellraiser comics series (by a publisher called Checker if I remember, with a good number of the best stories being put into a trio of hefty "Collected Best" comics anthologies) filled in a lot of the blanks in the movieverse, how and why things worked, and also introduced some of the enemies of the Cenobytes and demons, including the little detail that most believe that Hell won the war with Heaven under Leviathan's leadership, but that isn't actually true as revealed in a story where it turns out a lot of the mythos and crap going on with the mortal plane is pretty much propaganda for the war machine (such as silly children's urban legends, which they teach a teacher not to tell kids
are untrue for this reason). It also gets into concepts like Mame Morte (mother death) and her Harrowers fighting the Cenobites, and escapees from hell who do a little better than the guy from the first movie and start picking off Cenobytes by casting bullets made from pieces of Leviathan.. and all kinds of other crap, but most of it comes down to one or two issue stories where some idiot summons demons and gets what's coming to them, or in an ironic twist if it was more or less a good guy that did it, bringing doom to the people that messed with them (ie guy gets dragged to hell, comes back as a Cenobyte, drags tormentor off to eternal suffering). A lot of the Cenobytes are revealed to have a twisted sense of justice, which of course goes back to the second Hellraiser movie where they reveal that manipulating someone else to open the cube doesn't make them the target, it's all about who wanted it opened, and while they have no problem with collateral damage, they tend to more or less leave genuine innocents alone. The better a person you are if you wind up in hell the better the chances you'll become one of them, where if you set off to become one of them or are an evil douchbag they are likely to just torture you. There even being one guy they show in a story who winds up begging for eternity to be made one of them "as promised" for all of the stuff he did in their name... which they are never going to do.
At any rate that's Hellraiser in a nutshell without spoiling many specific movie plot points. I personally think the first four movies are the best (especially 1 and 2) 3 is okay, but largely acts as filler, 4 is goofy but ties a lot of things up within the movies themselves, the ones after that (Deader, Hellseeker, etc...) are decent stand alone stories, tying up the tale of the initial series protaganist from the first two movies, showing the mythology used in original stories, and in one case "Hellworld" playing mind games with series fans "but wait, Pinhead wouldn't do that, it doesn't work that way" only to become one of the more interesting Hellraiser stories in like the last three minutes (as well as having Lance Henrikson).
