#luke piotrowski

[addictivecontradiction]

The night house, 2020

[maxsindiecomics]

[PREVIEW] Ferocious #1 (November 19, 2025)

writer: Luke Piotrowski | artist [penciller & inker]: Emanuele Ercolani | colorist: Paolo Raiteri | letterer: Carlos M. Mangual | cover artist: Andy Clarke [pencils & inks] and José Villarrubia [colors] | publishing company: Mad Cave Studios

synopsis: A tavern boy’s sheltered life is overturned by the arrival of a towering, draconic woman, a wayward soldier from a distant war who single-handedly lays waste to his entire village. He swears an oath of righteous vengeance but in order to fulfill it he’ll have to seek training… from the warrior woman herself. Ferocious is epic fantasy on an intimate scale, a revenge thriller like no other, one that stirs the heart as it goes for the jugular.

[smashpages]

Out this week: Ferocious #1 (Mad Cave Studios, $4.99): 

Luke Piotrowski and Emanuele Ercolani deliver epic fantasy in this five-issue revenge thriller. A tavern boy’s sheltered life is overturned by the arrival of a towering, draconic woman. She's a wayward soldier from a distant war who single-handedly lays waste to his entire village. He swears an oath of righteous vengeance, but in order to fulfill it, he’ll have to seek training from the warrior woman herself.

See what else is coming to your local comic shop this week!

[storyofmorewhoa]

He woke me up, his hand was bleeding.

Hellraiser (2022)

[geekcavepodcast]

Hellraiser Teaser

20th Century Studios, Hulu, and Spyglass Media Group’s Hellraiser is a reimagining of Clive Barkers 1987 horror film. David Bruckner directs from a screenplay by Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski, and David S. Goyer. The cast includes Odessa A’zion, Jamie Clayton, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey, Brandon Flynn, Aoife Hinds, Jason Liles, Yinka Olorunnife, Selina Lo, Zachary Hing, Kit Clarke, Goran Visnjic, and Hiam Abbass.

A “young woman struggling with addiction comes into possession of an ancient puzzle box, unaware that its purpose is to summon the Cenobites, a group of sadistic supernatural beings from another dimension.” (20th Century Studios)

Hellraiser debuts on Hulu on October 7, 2022.

[randomrichards]

THE NIGHT HOUSE:

When her husband dies

She finds her life split in two

Demon lives in rooms

[rollingapex]

Remember when Prey dropped on Hulu and you watched it and thought it should have been released in theaters? I just watched Hellraiser (2022) and my biggest complaint is that I watched it on a tv.

To digress, I've never been much of tv nerd (general ignorance and lack of funds), even though I watch way more movies than actual tv programming. But I'm not pining for a Soundbar or QLED so much as pointing out that being in the theater and seeing these characters with a crowd on opening weekend in October is not something you can replicate at home.

This a reinterpretation of Hellraiser from 1987, which is a classic and well worth a rewatch. The 2022 update is longer by 30 minutes and you can't replace Doug Bradley, but Jamie Clayton makes this role her own. Pinhead/The Priest might not be the star, but she's captivating when she's on screen and delivers a mix gravitas and delight in torturing others. 

Hellraiser is helmed by David Bruckner who directed The Night House, which I've heard is really good and still haven't seen, and The Ritual (2017) which I loved  Writing team Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski have collaborated with Bruckner before and this movie reflects that confidence. They are patient, and it pays off, especially in the last half hour.

I watched hoping to be made uncomfortable by the Cenobites and their designs and I was. There's no universal scale for how squeamish horror might make you. For me there's something worse about the unreality of it, it's scarier when there is a dreamlike quality to the torture. The Order of the Gash aren't hiding outside in real life, but what they do is very much the stuff of nightmares. For me the thought that any night your could close your eyes and your brain could generate a nightmare is scarier than more realistic horror. 

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/8/2022: HELLRAISER (2022)

I think this movie is shining a light on the difference between how horror fans judge modern movies versus older ones, and perhaps especially versus the films of their childhood. I feel like I'm seeing a lot of responses from viewers who were immediately hung up on the glibly-deployed elements of addiction and recovery in HELLRAISER 2022, and so found themselves unable to engage with anything else in the movie. Personally…I just didn't take it so personally, and it occurred to me that I've never heard anyone complain about the ludicrous portrayal of mental illness and autism in HELLRAISER II, or the specter of incest that haunts HELLRAISER '87, and I could easily branch out into other much-adored movies that are not too socially-just, but that remain cozily swaddled in nostalgia, loved and forgiven. Maybe there's a feeling that newer movies should know better, coming as they do from an enlightened era of being fully informed about the suffering of others via the educational power of the internet, and therefore taking everything as seriously as possible. Maybe that makes modern viewers feel like it's too late to correlate the scourge of addiction with the quest for experience sought through the lament configuration. I mean, everybody has a right to their reactions and I think it's culturally healthy for even a really great work of art to take a few slings and arrows, to keep us all off autopilot. But I think that holding the human grist in HELLRAISER to the standards of neorealist drama is sort of missing the point of a movie like this—which is, of course, the cenobites.

And the cenobites are great! Director David Bruckner gives good monster yet again, having delivered a fabulous beast in 2017's THE RITUAL, and true to the spirit of 2020's THE NIGHT HOUSE, he shows a refined understanding of infernal geometry. David S. Goyer joins the screenwriters of the latter movie, Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, to set up a plot about a rich pervert (Goran Visnjic) who has a typically disappointing transaction with the cenobites, and so he manipulates a group of young dirtbags into helping him negotiate a new deal. I guess there are never enough survivors of cenobite commerce for word to get around that they only offer a monkey's paw type of thing, but I don't really care if the characters make a lot of dumb decisions so long as the tradeoff is always that I get to see cenobites.

The story centers on recovering addict Riley (Odessa A'zion, who I just have to mention is one of Pamela Adlon's kids!) who discovers the lament configuration during a robbery planned by her sleazy boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey). Riley's lapse of judgement allows the cenobites to make off with her brother (Brandon Flynn), and so Riley and her friends pursue the secrets of the puzzle box to try to save him. While HELLRAISER '22 has been described as a remake and a reboot and a reimagining in various quarters, David Bruckner has been clear that it's, like, just another Hellraiser story. There are a lot of books and comics and movies about all the different people who fall prey to the box's enticements, and it's totally reasonable to just make another one of those based on the series' abundantly flexible premise. Actually, while my husband and I were watching the movie, we started compulsively riffing on all the different things you could do: First we felt like Riley's misadventure with her unlucky friends was just like an episode of Search Party, which made us think about how funny it would be to introduce the lament configuration in other Bad People sitcoms like Seinfeld, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and then before long we were imagining a whole season of The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder tries to get a series of unfortunate rubes to open the box for him.

What HELLRAISER '22 offers is not grand insights into human nature, but fun experiments with the basic conceit. The lament configuration is one of the greatest designs in horror to be sure, and yet somehow nobody has ever gone into detail about why it assumes so many shapes. I normally do NOT want a bunch of anal retentive rules and dry explanations added to my horror movies; I find that the less mysterious things are, the less emotionally effective they are. In this case, the coding of each of the box's configurations as representing a different human longing both honors the original lore, and adds complimentary flavors—and speaking of flavor, I'd love it if someone would realize my idea for a breakfast cereal with freeze-dried marshmallow configurations. But anyway, the love of design and its expressive capabilities is laced through the whole movie, from its inventive architecture, to its fabulous new cenobites. A lot of love went into crafting these things, and Jamie Clayton easily earns her place in the expanded scheme of things. Viewers who are too distracted by HELLRAISER '22's tangential references to the real-life horrors have my sympathy, because if you can watch around the corners of that issue, there is much to enjoy.