Basements, Bruges and the easter bunny: the nine circles of film hell
From Georges Méliès to Bill and Ted, movie hells remain seriously in hock to the Judeo-Christian playbook
WARNING: This article contains spoilers.
Serial-killing windbag … Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built. Photograph: Cannes Film Festival
Anne Billson
Fri 7 Dec 2018 10.33 EST Last modified on Fri 7 Dec 2018 10.35 EST
At the end of Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built, Matt Dillon goes to hell. For many viewers this will come as a relief, since the director's tableau vivant of Eugène Delacroix's La Barque de Dante is reassuringly traditional, and quite soothing after more than two hours of being subjected to this serial-killing windbag and his atrocities.
Cinematic depictions of hell, like Von Trier's, tend to be reductively Manichean and almost endearingly literal. Nevertheless, hell in the movies comes in several different forms.
Village of the damned … In Bruges. Photograph: Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
1. The way station
Souls on their way to the afterlife are sometimes detained in a bureaucratic purgatory before being allowed to move on. (See A Matter of Life and Death, Beetlejuice, Afterlife.) But not all way stations are post-mortem versions of the civil service. In Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, Colin Farrell is obliged to reflect on his sins in a picturesque city full of misty canals, art museums and Belgian beer. "Maybe that's what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in fucking Bruges."
2. Hell is other people
According to Jean-Paul Sartre's play Huis Clos (No Exit), hell is being trapped in a room with people who torture you psychologically. We've all been there. A contemporary version would consist of being trapped in a cinema with people who talk, text and play with their smartphones, but any scenario in which characters are confined and tormenting each other would qualify: Night of the Living Dead, The Hateful Eight, Gone Girl, The Exterminating Angel ...
3. Gateway to hell
"If those gates are left open, it could mean the end of humanity," says Catriona MacColl in The City of the Living Dead, first of Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy. One could say the same for the gates in the other two films: The Beyond and The House By the Cemetery. What happens when Fulci's gates are opened? Zombies. Also, entrail-vomiting, bleeding from the eyes and decapitation.
In The Sentinel, a fashion model rents a suspiciously cheap Brooklyn apartment, only to find the building is a gateway to hell being guarded by John Carradine, and that a secret society of excommunicated Catholic priests need her to take over from him, and no, this wasn't in the tenants' agreement. In The Gate, little Stephen Dorff (in his film debut) inadvertently opens a hell gate in his house while his parents are out of town, letting in a swarm of ancient demons that have to be fought off with a heavy metal album and a Barbie doll. Event Horizon rings a change by setting its gateway on a spaceship in orbit around Neptune, where an experimental gravity drive has opened a door into a fleetingly glimpsed dimension full of screaming, eye-gouging and speaking in Latin, like PMQs on steroids.
4. Dragged to hell
"Ah, the old express bus to hell," says one of the good guys in The Frighteners as the villains are perforated by worms and sucked into the maw of a giant hell snake. In Ghost, the good ghosts go into the light, while the wicked ghosts are dragged into the depths by snarling shadow creatures. In Sleepy Hollow, evil Miranda Richardson is dragged into a hell tree by the headless horseman (albeit no longer headless, since he now has Christopher Walken's face). And in the spectacularly cruel ending to Drag Me to Hell, poor Christine is literally dragged by demonic arms into a flaming pit, all because she tried to be more assertive at work.
5. Hellbound
If there's no one to drag you to hell, you have to go there under your own steam. The last we see of Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart, he's in a big industrial elevator with metal grilles, going down. A long way down, all through the final credits. The Amicus anthology film Vault of Horror begins with five men, including Tom Baker and Terry-Thomas, in a lift in London's Millbank Tower. Mildly irritated to find themselves taken down to the "sub-basement", they find themselves trapped in a comfortably furnished room, where they start telling each other about their "strange, mysterious, unworldly" nightmares …
In the Thai horror movie Train of the Dead (2007), delinquents rob a kindergarten and crash their getaway van into innocent people before boarding a train bound for … you guessed it. The final segment in the Coen brothers' Netflix western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, joins five travellers in a stagecoach. Nothing is spelt out, but the increasingly ominous atmosphere suggests there's more to their destination, a spooky hotel, than meets the eye.
Give me infinity … Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. Photograph: Nelson/Orion/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
6. Musical comedy hell
In Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, the eponymous air-guitarist slackers are replaced by evil robot doubles and go to hell, where they're terrorised by their worst nightmares: granny, drill sergeant and the easter bunny. In Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen's version of hell resembles a not uncongenial S&M club with red lighting and hot tubs, reached by another of those industrial elevators, this time equipped with a department store-type intercom: "Floor eight: escaped war criminals, TV evangelists and the NRA."
Meanwhile, in the unironically titled "Satan's Alley" dance number from Staying Alive, John Travolta flexes his oiled naked torso while being whipped by men wearing Halle Berry Catwoman costumes. "Close to the fire! Higher and higher!" Oh yes indeed.
7. You're dead already!
The protagonists of Carnival of Souls and a clutch of other horror movies (which shall remain nameless to avoid spoilers) turn out to have been dead all along, and the entire film has been their death dream or hallucination. But since they spend most of that time being terrorised by whey-faced ghouls, or stuck on never-ending drives to nowhere, or being stalked and dismembered by psychos even though they're already dead, I'm calling it a kind of hell anyway.
8. Hell actually
The cinema has been showing us hell for almost as long as it has existed in films such as Georges Méliès's The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906) in which an unfortunate bloke is poked with cutlery before being roasted on a spit, or Giuseppe de Liguoro's L'Inferno (1911), which takes its cue from Gustave Doré's engravings and accordingly provides a full complement of naked people being tortured by winged demons and inclement topography.
A century later, in The House That Jack Built, nothing much has changed except special effects technology. The underworld of What Dreams May Come features wrecked battleships, an upside-down cathedral and the faces of damned souls embedded like cobblestones in the ground. Movie hells still draw on the Judeo-Christian imagery and symbolism of western art, though even the Buddhist hells in Asian films such as Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960) or Kim Young-hwa's Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds (2017) don't seem so very far removed from Bosch or Breugel.
9. Hell on Earth
If video clips of the Californian wildfires are a harbinger of our globally warmed future, we soon won't be needing CGI to recreate the fiery hell of Constantine (2005), which Keanu Reeves visits by staring into the eyes of a cat. In the meantime, we can seek consolation in TV's The Good Place, which examines and subverts the entire concept of eternal damnation and the ethics of good and evil in 20-minute weekly increments. If we're all going to hell, it might as well be in good company, with jokes.