[In progress] Hellraiser (1987) [Project: Celluloid]

[LucasGodzilla]

Hopefully, that title doesn't sound too dumb; Anyways, welcome to this little experiment of mine. If you may recall from a little while back, I brought up the movie Hellraiser in a post as an example of a movie that's had its color grade extremely skewed for home releases.

Anyways, I suppose the best way to start a thread like would be to show a drastic comparison or something like that. A while back on the Blu-Ray forums in a thread for Blue Underground's 4K transfer of Lucio Fulci's Zombie, there were a few posts that took a brief tangent away from Zombie and went to talk about Clive Barker's Hellraiser. There was a post by a user under the name of JohnCarpenterFan that was kind of an eye-opener for many: It basically compared high-quality stills from a preserved archival print of the movie with the Arrow transfer, ranting about their differences.

It is very interesting that you brought up Hellraiser. 

I recently managed to get my hands on a well-preserved archival print, watched it, took some scans, made sure they were representative of how it looked correctly projected and compared it with the Arrow Blu-ray.

Be aware that I really liked the Arrow Blu-ray despite the peculiar grain, and didn't have any problems with the color timing... When I watched this print, I couldn't believe my eyes. This film when viewed on film looks absolutely incredible, very stylish, quite a lot of blue lighting. I had no idea this film looked that good, home video has just done it a complete disservice.

One thing I will say is that this print was not grainy at all, even in low-light conditions there was nothing out of the ordinary, I wasn't even aware of it most of the time. 

When I flicked through the Arrow disc not long after, it looked flat and orange compared to what I had seen, it looked ugly and noisy. In the scene where the cenobites appear at the hospital, the room in the print appeared more blue with Pinhead's skin also being bathed in blue which helped draw attention away from the make-up, on the Arrow the room is more neutral and the make-up job on Pinhead really stands out. Also in a scene near the end (see last picture below), in the print, there's clearly blue lighting in the background and the characters directly in front of the camera are covered in a warm glow from a fireplace (IIRC), yet on the Arrow, everything is again flat and orange.







It was like watching the film for the first time. I'd love it if every studio/label took the Warner approach and used answer prints (or at the very least view multiple theatrical prints) to assist with color timing. This "Hold back on the colors/contrast, keep the shadows intact, make everything look natural" way of thinking has got to go. It's not purist in the slightest, in fact it goes directly against what film naturally looks like.

Reading this, I decided to do a bit of a comparison and ripped my Arrow copy of Hellraiser for comparison and well, the differences are pretty big. I weren't able to find the exact frames for all of them but I was able to at least pinpoint frames that were nearly the same.

Screenshot Comparison Here

I highly suspect that what we have in the Arrow transfer is a 2K scan of the negatives with a brand new color grade subsequent since the colors are quite different. I can't prove whether or not that's true since it's just officially detailed merely as a "Brand new 2K restoration approved by director of photography Robin Vidgeon", however it's quite obvious that there's some sort of going inconsistency here.

Certainly makes me wish there's some release of this movie now that addresses this issue. Maybe some of y'all could give a crack at making a restoration of this color grade if you want a challenge or something.

Obviously, I am taking my own advice on this. Unfortunately, I have little experience in working with color grading so bear with me please as I try to figure things out.

At this very moment in time, I have created five separate LUTS (using Dr. Dre's Color Matching tool) for each of the stills and I am working on seeing if I can be able to mix all five into some sort of balanced mix.

Independently Re-Graded Arrow Frames

(Before)

(After)

Please note the irregular cropping is due to the process I did in order to accurately color match

Unfortunately, though, that's not my only current problem since I seem to be unable to import the M2TS rip of the movie into Da Vinci Resolve (The instant I try dragging it in or importing it manually, it just crashes). So uh, yeah, I wonder how this will end up.

Also, if anyone somehow has any scans of the movie's print I could use for further reference, I would greatly appreciate it since I haven't been able to find anything on my own (As of right now, I only have those five stills and I am currently asking if JohnCarpenterFan has any other scans he didn't post on that thread).