The concept of Hell or Hades,
that place of eternal fire and brimstone the souls of evil wrongdoers go after
they die, is as old as time itself and as such a favorite staple of the horror
genre. Visualized as either another
dimension or an inverse look at our own Earth, often with images of towering
flames, souls tormented by fanged and horned demons and a centaur like creature
who rules supreme, Hell is one of the most feared places in theology, mythology
and traditional folklore. Popularized by
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy with
its many stages of the underworld including Hell, Purgatory and finally
Paradise, the concept of Hell is intrinsic to pop cultural notions of morality,
mortality and the prospect of eternal damnation.
Simply put, this most dreaded of places beyond comprehension with only
our imagination to provide some sort of interpretation is in our blood and
serves as a moral compass of sorts guiding people towards the light instead of
the dark. With 31 Days of Hell kicking
off this month for the Movie Sleuth, it occurred to me that through all the
horror movies we cover each year this special October holiday rolls around that
we rarely focus on the titular underworld of torment and punishment
itself. Some films such as the Hellraiser series or Dante’s Inferno devote themselves
entirely to visualizing the concept on film, but what about the more unique
interpretations that are not necessarily of the horror genre or aren’t the
primary focus but serve as part of the whole?
In other words, this particular underworld which in and of itself has
become synonymous with horror and Halloween, what are some of the examples of
this classical vision of the endless pit that don’t necessarily appear where or
as we would expect them to be? With
this, the Movie Sleuth takes a good look at eight unique imaginings of the
underworld you didn’t expect, aren’t necessarily tied to horror and don’t
follow those overplayed traditions of hoofed and horned figures dancing around
flames with souls crying out in torment.
Brainstorm
Douglas Trumbull’s 1983
ill-fated cult classic Brainstorm about
a team of scientists who develop a headset which can record and playback human
thoughts and experiences on a 70mm rainbow colored magnetic tape is a visual
effects light and sound show of boundless imagination full of awe and
wonderment, the kind of by design which plays like an IMAX movie ride
transporting the viewer into worlds they’ve never been in before. It’s cinema as sensory gratification with a
unique play on the dynamics between 35mm film and 70mm widescreen film as well
as monaural sound versus 6-track magnetic Dolby Stereo, very much a tech demo
as thought provoking science fiction.
Mid-picture, one of the scientists Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher)
suffers a heart attack and dies, but not before she manages to slip the headset
on and hit the record button, capturing her journey into the afterlife on tape
for anyone brave enough to see what lies on the other side. Chief scientist Michael Brace (Christopher
Walken) becomes obsessed and determined with unlocking the secrets of this tape
even if it endangers his own life and we experience with him a journey into the
past, present and finally the afterlife through the headset. Upon his journey is a very brief but unforgettable
glimpse of Hell which is forever etched onto the memory of all who see it. Lasting only a few seconds (cut considerably
after test audiences reacted too strongly to it), instead of the traditional
images of mountain rock and fire, we instead find ourselves trapped in these
fleshy cocoons of meat, muscle, ligaments, blood and fluid with translucent
bubbles of tormented and bloodied souls clawing at the walls as sparks and
lightning flash amid the messy, organic looking environment. Shown in a rapid succession of subliminal
flash cuts, it’s among the few visions of the afterlife photographed in 65mm
and of the visions of the underworld the least like any other I can think of in
film. It’s a shame this sequence was
trimmed down to nothing after bad previews, as it’s a wholly original vision
with physicality and a genuinely organic look to it, the likes of which have
only been seen in some of the living fleshscapes seen in iD Software’s Doom series.
All
Dogs Go to Heaven
Is it just me or are Don Bluth’s
animated family features all filled with moments that are frankly traumatizing
for children? Whether it’s the
allegorical connection to the holocaust in An
American Tail with it’s central hero Fievel violently separated from his
family or the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time or even the backstory of the rats in The Secret of NIMH, the former Disney
animator who broke away from the studio to form his own animation team in favor
of the more saturated colors of Disney’s earlier Golden Age of animation has
churned out quite the list of somewhat edgier animated features over the course
of the 1980s and 90s. While not quite
approaching the degree of graphic violence of Martin Rosen’s adaptation of Watership Down, the events of three or four
of Bluth’s films easily eclipse the potentially traumatizing elements of, say,
Disney’s The Lion King or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Case in point is the 1989 film All Dogs Go to Heaven, a colorful
musical comedy about a German Shepherd named Charlie (voiced by Burt Reynolds)
with criminal ties who is murdered by his former partner Carface (Vic Tayback)
but rejects his place in Heaven in order to come back to life. Throughout the film is a veiled threat of going
to Hell as punishment for forsaking Heaven and in a particularly terrifying and
seemingly out-of-nowhere nightmare sequence Charlie experiences, that quite
literally happens as the mutt imagines himself thrust deep through a tornado
into a volcanic lava soaked underworld of skeletons, fire and Hellhounds which
bite and claw at the terrified dog. If
that’s not enough, towering over Charlie is a ball of fire which transforms
into a kind of Hellhound dragon that is infinitely more frightening than
anything from Maleficent’s doing in Sleeping
Beauty. Though it only appears to be
a dream sequence as Charlie awakens to cute little puppies tugging at him,
wondering what’s wrong, the nightmare sequence leaves quite the mark and in
Bluth’s oeuvre is among the most terrifying sequences the animator has ever
created.
The
Black Hole
Years before Paul W.S.
Anderson of Mortal Kombat fame gave
us “Hellraiser in Space” in the form
of the 1997 science fiction horror thriller Event
Horizon, the idea of a spaceship with interstellar space travel by
utilizing the untamed energies of a black hole inadvertently opening a portal
to the netherworld was touched on much earlier by Disney’s The Black Hole in 1979.
Quick to capitalize on the Star
Wars craze, Walt Disney Productions embarked on what would be their most
expensive commercial and commercial failure to date with a kind of
mad-scientist thriller involving a team of astronauts from the USS Palomino who
stumble upon a ship orbiting a black hole.
Armed with an evil robot named Maximilian which looks sort of like a
cross between the androids of Battlestar
Galactica merged with Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, the star studded crew of the Palomino soon find
themselves fighting for their lives against an army of drones led by the diabolical
Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) as the ship drifts closer to the
gravitational pull of the black hole.
Largely a special effects bonanza aimed at kids despite being
considerably more violent than anything Disney had released at the time and
failed attempt to produce a successful toy line of tie-in action figures, The Black Hole joins All Dogs Go to Heaven as another
“family” oriented movie that makes an out-of-nowhere swan dive into the abyss
of eternal fire. In a surreal sequence
aiming to defy the space time continuum in the same manner the finale of
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey did
as the crew of the Palomino are sucked into the titular black hole, the film’s
central villains Reinhardt and his robot Maximilian become fused together as
one being in a kind of inter-dimensional Hellscape of towering flames, brimstone
and forsaken mountaintops. While only
lasting about a minute along with an equally baffling vista of Heaven which
assails the viewer before both we and the crew emerge from the black hole
intact, this brief slow motion visual effects shot of the inferno is still
talked about to this day from the mouths of former 7 year old viewers who went
to see Star Wars and did not see the
traumatizing kingdom of Beelzebub coming at all. Moreover, while we’ve come to expect former
Disney animator Don Bluth to serve up this sort of witches’ brew, seeing it
come out of Disney itself remains a most unusual moment in their creative
history. By now, The Black Hole has mostly all but been forgotten as a mediocre
cash-in on the Star Wars phenomenon
that managed to open up a few doors in the special effects department but
ultimately is regarded as a bit of an eyesore for the company. That said, it still laid the tracks for Event Horizon and marked one of the few
times the Disney machine tried to push the envelope with images and ideas child
viewers weren’t necessarily used to or prepared for.
Akira Kurosawa's Dreams
An achingly beautiful
tearjerker or the most self-indulgent effort in the career of one of Japan’s
greatest film directors, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
(his second feature financed with American money) is at once the director’s
most cherished and divisive creation to date.
Fully funded by Warner Brothers with assistance from Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, Dreams
is a series of eight surreal vignettes based on various dreams the director
had. While seemingly lacking a
conventional narrative plot between each seemingly disconnected segment, the
film follows who seems to be a young Kurosawa in the process of aging into
adulthood. A work of pure magical
imagination, the likes of which wouldn’t have been possible were it not for
Kurosawa’s stature as one of world cinema’s most important creative
visionaries, Dreams is full of such ethereal
awe and haunting beauty that to see and hear it is overwhelming. It is also the least likely place you would
expect to find a vision of Hell, as so much of Dreams seems poised to reach for the Heavens in an attempt to touch
God. And yet, Dreams contains two segments which take the viewer into the mouth
of Hades itself, starting with the segment Mount
Fuji in Red depicting nuclear holocaust when a power plant begins to melt
down and ending with a literal foray into the pit with The Weeping Demon. Depicting
a war torn Tokyo amid a misty mountain, our nameless protagonist (Kurosawa in
spirit) stumbles upon a deformed vagrant with a horn growing out of his
head. It turns out the physical
deformities and oversized botanical life are the result of nuclear fallout and
soon our hero is led towards a blood soaked water hole with many tortured souls
writhing about in agony as they clutch their horns and claw the soil. As close to a literal interpretation of a
Hieronymus Bosch painting as the legendary Japanese auteur has ever come, Mount Fuji in Red and The Weeping Demon represent a truly
chilling vision of the underworld created by man’s own self-destructive
tendency towards nuclear annihilation.
Part of what makes The Weeping
Demon so profoundly unsettling is how long Kurosawa holds on slow motion
images of agonized tortured souls twisting and contorting, leaving ample time
for the atmosphere to soak itself in.
While some may point towards Nobou Nakagawa’s Jigoku as a source of inspiration, never once did that film in all
of its grotesque splendor manage to unsettle me quite the way Kurosawa’s The Weeping Demon did, conjuring up
notions that the worst demons in all of the netherworld are within each and
every one of us.
Lost
Highway
P.T.
This entry is a little
different from the rest in that it stems from a videogame instead of a film,
although of the offerings listed this might be one of the most unique and
deeply terrifying total vision of Hell ever conceived. Previously released on the PlayStation 4 and
intended as a playable teaser for what ultimately did not become Silent Hills after being sadly cancelled
by Konami, P.T. is a thoroughly
unsettling gaming experience which takes the dream logic of the Silent Hill series and turns it on its
head. In the game, you awaken on the
floor as cockroaches crawl nearby and open a door to an eerie hallway inside a
home with the chandelier rocking back and forth lightly. As you reach the end of the hallway you go
through a door and, good God, you’re right back where you started. Soon as you continue to find an exit or look
for carefully hidden clues including time changes on the clock, insignia
written on photographs and messages on a radio, you will traverse this same
hallway over and over again until things go from subtly strange to overtly
terrifying. Sometimes you’ll hear
laughing or crying, eerie shaking spirits peering through windows and at one
point the hallway itself changes colors with a ghostly figure standing at the
opposite end of the hallway. Really, is
there a more frightening vision of Hell than this? Imagine being stuck in the same hallway ad
infinitum with no escape and an ever shifting environment that only becomes
more dangerous and frightening with time.
There’s a limit to how far you can progress in this puzzle game before
time runs out and you are abruptly assaulted and killed by some kind of demon
whose shaky face with eyes rolled back into its head shakes violently before
you die. The sound design itself is
particularly unnerving with disembodied cackling and strange industrial sounds
filling the rear channels of your surround sound system. It’s not so much that P.T. assaults you with scare after scare but after a while of being
stuck in the same environment that grows more and more bizarre and unearthly as
time goes on, you find yourself increasingly desperate to escape this
prison. There was a point playing this
at 3am in 7.1 surround sound where even though nothing was happening, just
being stuck in this hallway where anything evil could happen at any moment with
the same sounds growing steadily louder became too much and I had to shut it
off. I’m an avid fan of survival horror
with the second Silent Hill game
released on the PlayStation 2 being my favorite videogame of all time. To this day, nothing tops P.T. in terms of white knuckle terror in
survival horror. If there is a Hell, it
is being trapped in a hallway like the one in P.T. where there’s no way to leave and no way to predict what will
happen to you next.
Salo
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
transposition of the Marquis De Sade’s The
120 Days of Sodom into Italy in the waning days of WWII, Salo, remains one of the most shocking
and deeply disturbing films of all time.
Initially reviled and censored before Pasolini’s untimely death (some
still argue his passing is linked to the film) before grudgingly being called a
work of modern art, Salo concerns
four Nazi-fascists in Mussolini ruled Italy who kidnap a large number of women
and children before housing them in a secluded castle and enacting their every
perversely violent sexual desire on their victims, culminating in ritualistic
murder and death. Dripping from the
seams with torture and degradation, Salo was
and still is a difficult watch made by one of Italy’s most celebrated
intellectual provocateurs in the throes of artistic crisis. Intended to be an almost Dadaist transitional
work before returning to his bawdier life affirming films spoken in the same
breath as his Trilogy of Life, Salo represents the one time the extreme
artist created an expression of negativity and hopelessness. While undeniably based on fact with the
intention to shock and anger viewers with war atrocities of the past, it truly
is the finale of the film with the more subservient victims taken under the
fascists’ wings and the rebellious ones subjected to unspeakable tortures that
provides a physical flesh and blood image of Hell on Earth. Through the use of wide angle shots and
binocular close-ups through the fascists’ sneering point of view, we become
complicit in the gazing upon the atrocities ensuing onscreen much in the same
way Michael Haneke’s Funny Games’
serial killers involve you the viewer in the wrongdoing. As Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana plays on the soundtrack over Hieronymous Bosch
inspired images of naked bodies being raped, whipped, mutilated, and branded as
the demonic fascists savor every infliction of pain committed against innocent
victims, we get a very real physical sense of a kind of Hell both Earthly and symbolic. During the tortures, one of the fascists asks
a former victim turned new recruit if he knows how a Bolshevik goes into the
red sea and remarks ‘He goes splash!’
Pasolini’s bleak and anarchic vision of Hell is a depraved ocean of
blood, flesh, shit and piss into which we the unfortunate spectators too must go
splash.
God’s
Wrath is Hell
If there’s any social
collective that lives in constant fear of Hell and eternal damnation the most,
it is undoubtedly the born again Christians.
Preaching that if you don’t pray all day everyday you will surely plunge
into the inferno, there has never been a more terrified or terrifying group
than this one. Emerging from the group
are a series of DVDs available on the website www.freecdtracts.com consisting of a
number of compact discs, lectures, pamphlets and of course, low budget short
films dramatizing the dreaded abyss.
Most of them are just conversational with testimonies from people
claiming to have had near death experiences where they caught a glimpse of Hell
and all of its horrors firsthand, but one which stood out from the rest and
circulated frequently on YouTube is a nine minute short video known as God’s Wrath is Hell. Opening with the tagline ‘If you died
tonight, where would you go?’ and depicting a woman who is in intensive care
after a life threatening car accident, the woman goes under and reawakens bound
and gagged in some kind of flesh, chain and rock covered netherworld where
disembodied screams can be heard in the distance, ribcage like prison gates
with streams of light shining through and decomposed entities hanging upside
down are tormented by demons. Inhuman
intestinal-like worms and snakes creep in amid fire and smoke as the terrified
woman looks on. Many of the props and
effects in this thing are obviously cheap Halloween props that are dressed up
with lighting, fog machines and clever editing but some of it works. There’s a witchy demon with a spider and
strange facehugger-like creature which claws its way free of her chest before
being lit on fire and a lot of flimsy looking plastic skeletons shaking violently
in a cauldron. Then there is of course a
red-eyed horned demon promising horrific tortures which looks like a cross
between the monster from Michael Mann’s The
Keep and the xenomorph from Alien if
they had sex with one of the terror dogs from Ghostbusters. Think of a well-dressed Haunted House amusement park
that just so happened to be filmed and cut together into a video. There doesn’t seem to be one version of this
little Christploitation Halloween video, with some versions including snippets
from the remake of Pulse starring
Kristen Bell and others with a pastor preaching Hell, fire and brimstone to all
nonbelievers. As it stands, there’s not
a lot of information about the making of this short video online, who directed
it or who stars in it though many Christian sites host the video including a
DVD you can order online. Of the visions
of Hell on this list, God’s Wrath is Hell
is easily the cheapest and silliest one designed with the sole purpose of
converting nonbelievers through the use of fear. But it had some nifty moments Bosch and Giger
would be proud of.
- Andrew Kotwicki