Watch the Dead by Daylight Hellraiser trailer and start playing as Pinhead now

The Dead by Daylight Hellraiser chapter is live, and a new trailer heralds the arrival of the Cenobite Hell Priest known as "Pinhead."

Pinhead is a new Killer, naturally, but the developers at Behaviour Interactive had to take a step back from their usual approach to translate Hellraiser's horror to Dead by Daylight: he isn't your typical slasher villain who goes lumbering after victims one by one. In fact, he barely moves at all. Animation director David Prenoveau explained the process of making Pinhead a killer who still felt true to his source material on the PlayStation Blog.

"In DbD we have a basic set of mechanics that are common to all Killers, like picking victims up and tossing them onto hooks," Prenoveau said. "For every single one of these we asked ourselves ‘how can we make sure this really feels like Pinhead?’ Our answer ended up being to use his chains and hooks as an interaction tool. As the player you control Pinhead’s chains and use them to manipulate Survivors in ways other Killers need to do by hand. We’re hoping this touch makes the player feel even more powerful when they’re playing as Pinhead!"

The post details the particulars of Pinhead's playstyle: his main power Summons of Pain creates a gateway that can be used to summon forth a controllable chain, or just to scout areas of the map. In another nod to the film series, any match with Pinhead present will also have a puzzle box somewhere on the map: survivors can find and solve the Lament Configuration to postpone a deadly Chain Hunt, but picking it up may give Pinhead enough time to teleport directly to you and tear your soul apart. It's just what he does.

Find more frights in our guide to the best horror games.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.