Hiam Abbass avoided horror movies before Hellraiser: "I come from a background... with a lot of fearful things"

Hiam Abbass

Everyone starts somewhere. Although Succession star Hiam Abbass may be trying her hand at a new kind of terror in Hulu’s Hellraiser remake, the horror genre is still a largely new world for her. In a new interview with The A.V. Club’s Todd Gilchrist, the Palestinian actor says that she avoided horror films for much of her life due to discomfort with the subject material.

“I come from a background where it was already loaded with a lot of fearful things, so I couldn’t cope with watching things that would get me back to that fear,” Abbass shares. “On the contrary, I needed things that would just open my imagination to something more beautiful, less fearful, and more promising,”

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According to Abbass, what finally spurred a shift was a realization that just maybe, being onscreen in a horror picture would help her shake off her viewing jitters.

“I grew up that way, but then I thought maybe being in it would help me get through watching it,” she explains.

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So, did it help? As far as Abbass is concerned, absolutely. In her eyes, a key indicator is that she was actually able to watch this film, even with its “really scary moments.” She also emphasizes just how frightening the Hellraiser set was, from terrifyingly realized cenobites to jarring surround sound.

“These scary moments in the movie as we see them now, they were really scary on set because they were real,” Abbass recalls. “The cenobites were human beings in these costumes, they were real, the light was real, the sounds that were coming from everywhere were real. It was something that was built onset to help us be very truthful to what we were giving.”

Hellraiser will be available exclusively on Hulu for streaming starting October 7.