• O C T. VIII. • Coil — “Main Title” (unreleased Hellraiser theme)

From the 1987 album The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser.

That soundtrack that Christopher Young did for Hellraiser? It wasn't Clive Barker's first choice.
Barker had initially commissioned Coil to crate the soundtrack, as he was a big fan of theirs, stating they were “...the only group I've heard on disc whose records I've taken off because they made my bowels churn.”. According to a 1992 interview with Coil, some of the ideas for Pinhead may have even come from a stack of piercing magazines and other such items that they gave Barker when he visited their house around the time he was working on the story.

So what happened? Why does Hellraiser have that "generic horror film orchestral music" soundtrack, despite Barker being so keen on using the Coil soundtrack? Well, Coil was unhappy about the way the film was being watered down from it's initial vision and the way the studio was treating the people involved, and they pulled out right around the same time the studio execs at New World rejected it because they didn't think it sounded "commercial" enough, and were more interested in giving the job to someone more like Howard Shore than a group of Hollywood outsiders.

Hellraiser could have been a film known not just for Lemarchand's box and Pinhead, but also (much like Suspiria, and other Goblin scored horror movies) for its rather unique and unsettling synth-driven soundtrack. Alas, this never came to be. The movie still rules, though.