LOS ANGELES, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- Adam Faison said filming his torture scene in Hellraiser, on Hulu Friday, demanded endurance on the set.
"It was grueling, man," Faison told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "That day, we were doing that pretty much for 10 hours straight."
The trailer shows part of the scene in which Colin (Faison) is caught by hell's cenobites. They lift him up and pull him with wires that dig into his skin.
In the film, Colin's roommate Riley (Odess A'Zion) opens the puzzle box that summons the cenobites from hell. The Priest, aka Pinhead (Jamie Clayton) forces Riley to choose which of her friends to sacrifice to hell.
Faison said the hardest part of his torture scene was the harness holding him in mid-air.
"After even just two minutes of keeping your arms up, it's one of the craziest arm workouts I've ever gotten," Faison said. "But also I was having to keep my head cocked back, and the harness was keeping my torso back."
The wires were fake, so they did not actually dig into his skin. Faison said the stunt team pulled the strings tight so they appeared taught on his skin.
"They were these elastic silver string things," Faison said. "Those were not as painful so much as the harness and staying in that position for so long,"'
Another cenobite, the Chatterer (Jason Liles), pursues Colin with his clacking teeth.
"It was this motorized mouth," Faison said. "Also, he has no eyes, so you can't really see anything going on in his head. It made him even less human and even more terrifying."
Faison said Liles remained in the costume between takes and told him he decided not to break character to test his own ability to embody a cenobite.
"You'd get breaks, but he's like, 'You really have to fight the urge to feel like you want to get out,'" Faison said. "It's almost a mental physical fitness test because you're just basically stuck in this thing between takes sometimes for an hour or hours at a time."
Colin is the boyfriend to Riley's brother, Matt (Brandon Flynn). Hellraiser creator Clive Barker is gay, but wrote the original story and movie about a deviant straight couple.
"I originally remember reading that [Barker] was like, 'This is what I imagined if I had come out, these demons were what might come to get me,'" Faison said. "It was very cool that we could honor his text and also bring in these new characters."
The original 1987 film focused on Frank (Sean Chapman) and his lover, Julia (Claire Higgins). Frank opens the puzzle box seeking the ultimate pleasure and pain, and finds the cenobites.
When Julia moves into Frank's old house with his brother, Larry (Andrew Robinson), Larry's blood brings Frank back from hell as a skinless skeleton. Faison said he found Frank dangerously attractive in the original.
"You have this weird sort of warring thing going on in your head, like this shouldn't be hot, but there's something just very hot about him," Faison said. "Just the grit of him and just the tenacity -- he just never gave up."
