Looks like Pinhead from Hellraiser is coming to Dead By Daylight

Multiplayer dead teenager simulator Dead By Daylight has previously added killers like Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2, the Ghostface Killer from Scream, Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, the Demogorgon from Stranger Things, and, oh yeah, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger. It's a broad selection.

Hints about who the next killer would be included audio files posted to Discord that revealed the word HELL via spectrogram, and letters posted to Twitter that spelled out RAISE. Then came a teaser video showing a fuzzy VHS recording of a red flower blossoming (as seen when the Cenobites are summoned in Hellraiser) and the number 1987, the year Hellraiser was released.

So expect Pinhead, the S&M Hell Priest from the Clive Barker movie and its many sequels, to be Dead By Daylight's next killer. He has a thing for hooks, which suits the game, though he and the other Cenobites only target people who open their mysterious puzzle boxes in the movies, rather than any kid who happens to enrol for the wrong summer camp. But then Pyramid Head doesn't really make sense outside his mythos either, and the deep lore of Dead By Daylight has the events of the game taking place in an Omniverse that apparently combines alternate realities, so let's just agree to shrug and roll with it.

Some fans in the comments and on Reddit were convinced the next killer would be a character from Five Nights at Freddy's, but the clues all pretty consistently point to Hellraiser. I mean, someone even looked up the filename of the teaser on Dead By Daylight's Chinese channel and found the word Hellraiser in it. The new killer will be added to Dead By Daylight in Chapter 21.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.