Hell in popular culture

Hell is a common theme for entertainment and popular culture, particularly in the Horror and Fantasy genres where it is often used as a location.

Art

• Perhaps the most famous depictions of hell can be viewed in many paintings by medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights is probably the most famous.
• Gustave Doré made illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedy, including Dante's visit to hell.
• Auguste Rodin made a sculpture, The Gates of Hell, based on Hell depicted in Dante's The Divine Comedy.

Cartoons, comics and televised cartoon series

• In the DC Universe, the character Lobo was banned from Hell, as he caused too many problems there, thus achieving immortality, as he was also banned from Heaven for much the same reason. Hell in the Sandman Series is run by a triumvirate of Lucifer Morningstar, Azazel, and Beelzebub. However demons like Belial and the Rhymer Etrigan scheme to get into the Triumverate. When the Fire of Hell is extinguished, an act of evil is required to reignite it. This is done by Eclipso slitting Enchantresse's throat. Hell is divided into Nine provinces. The Nine Provinces included Pandemonia, The Odium, The Gull, Praetori, Internecia, Ament, Labyrinth, Err, and Purgatory. Everything there is made from the damned. The rulers of Purgatory, Blaze and Satanus, lead a rebellion by offering hope to the hopeless, and finally Blaze betrays her brother and becomes Hell's ruler.
• In the comic strip Dilbert (created by Scott Adams) "heck" is a lesser version of hell reserved for people who have done misdeeds that are not evil enough to warrant hell. Heck is ruled by Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light who carries a giant spoon instead of a pitchfork.
• In the one-panel comic The Far Side (created by Gary Larson in the 1980s) Hell is featured among other recurring themes, depicting Satan and his minions as grim-looking figures in robes with horns and pitchforks, running the place in business-like manner: in one instance, the bespectacled secretary behind the typewriter asks her boss seen as a silhouette behind the office door: There is an insurance salesman here. Should I admit him in or tell to go to Heaven?
• In the television series Futurama, the characters go to Robot Hell on occasion, where the Robot Devil and other evil robots reside. The entrance is located in New Jersey.
• In the comic book series Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze sold his soul to the demon Mephisto to cure his adoptive father from dying of cancer. In the recent revival of the series we see the Ghost Rider residing in Hell to pay up his end of the bargain. Hell is depicted as a red desert with cannons and pools of lava. We see the devil as a powerful political leader residing in a grand palace with many servants and advisors.
• In the comic book series Hellboy by award-winning artist Mike Mignola, Hell is a dark, alternate dimension filled with flames and demons and where the infernal capital city of Pandemonium resides. In issue one "Seed of Destruction" the Nazis with aid of the mad monk Rasputin successfully breach the boundary of Hell via magic and call forth the infant Hellboy so that he may bring about the end of the world. They are stopped, however, by the Allied Forces, who rescue Hellboy and raise him.
• The comic book Spawn sees Hell and its demons as an important plot element. Mercenary Al Simmons gets betrayed by his own employers, dies, and goes to Hell. He then makes a deal with the devil Malebolgia (Guardian of Hell) that if he agrees to fight with Malebolgia's army, he would get to return to Earth and see his wife again.
• In many episodes of the television series South Park, "(Do the Handicapped Go to Hell?/Probably"), Satan appears. On many occasions, he is accompanied by his homosexual lover Saddam Hussein, who seems to be even more malicious than Satan himself. Hell in the series is an overpopulated place where several famous people as Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Walter Matthau, Dean Martin, Diana, Princess of Wales, Tiny Tim, Michael Landon, Gene Siskel, George Burns, Andy Dick, and Mahatma Gandhi live next to more obvious people as Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Djenghis Khan and Mao Zedong. Only Mormons seem to go to Heaven.
• Warner Bros. cartoons occasionally depict Hell. In Devil's Feud Cake, Yosemite Sam repeatedly tries to kill Bugs Bunny, but always ends up back in Hell, having to face Satan. In Draftee Daffy, after Daffy Duck accidentally kills himself while trying to escape a man from the draft board, he wakes up in Hell, only to be reunited with the man. At the end of The Hole Idea, the professor slips a hole under his domineering wife, sending her to Hell, but Satan rejects her. In Satan's Waitin', Sylvester goes to Hell after plummeting to his death, but Satan (in the form of a dog) lets him use up the rest of his nine lives on Earth. In Three Little Bops, the Big Bad Wolf's botched attempt to blow up a jazz club sends him to Hell, where he learns how to play jazz properly, at which point the Three Little Pigs admit him to the band.

Film

• In the 1991 film Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, the title characters end up in Hell.
• Hell is also depicted in Tex Avery's The Blitz Wolf (1942).
• Constantine (a 2005 Warner Bros. film) depicts as graphic a version of the traditional Christian version of Hell as can be found in cinema: it shows a parallel plane with many of the same buildings and structures as the normal world, but twisted, ruined and perpetually seared as if eternally hit by the blast wave of a nuclear bomb. This film is based on the DC/Vertigo comic series Hellblazer.
• A depiction of Hell based on Dante's Inferno appears in the 1935 Spencer Tracy film Dante's Inferno.
• In the film Deconstructing Harry by Woody Allen, the protagonist descends into Hell where he has a chance to learn from the Devil himself (played by Billy Crystal), among other things about the significance of having air conditioning in Hell, and then proceeds to discover his own father.
• The film Drag Me to Hell tells the story of a woman cursed by an evil gypsy. The curse will send her to Hell unless she can get rid of it.
• The film Event Horizon also deals with themes of Hell. Set aboard a spaceship with an experimental, singularity-inducing reactor core that was supposed to travel faster than light by "folding space" but instead entered another dimension, which is implied to have been Hell or a Hell like universe, were it gained a demonic life-force and returned from that dimension "alive".
• In the Disney film Fantasia (1940), the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence shows Chernobog ruling Hell.
• Hell is depicted in the Danish film classic Häxan (1922).
• Hell is subjective in the Hellraiser film series, as well as Clive Barker's novella. Upon solving the Lament Configuration, the sinner, or victim experiences a hell which they themselves defined by their own actions.
• 2000's Little Nicky depicts hell as a kingdom where monsters, giant fire birds, flying jellyfish and a large castle named the Castle of The Underworld belong. Satan (Harvey Keitel) performs tasks such as shoving a pineapple up Hitler's posterior.
• In the Pluto cartoon Pluto's Judgement Day Pluto is sent to Hell where he is punished for harming cats.
• The 2006 film Silent Hill depicts Hell numerous times throughout the film. Hell is depicted as a modern world, but decayed and rusted, populated by strange and horrific creatures.
• What Dreams May Come, a 1998 film that won an Academy Award for its depiction of heaven and hell as the subjective creations of the individual, was an essentially mystical interpretation of heaven, hell and reincarnation. Aided by his personal angel (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), an accidentally killed man (Robin Williams) leaves his personal Heaven home and searches the depths of many and varied Hells to find and rescue his wife, who is in her own damnation because the loss of her family drove her to suicide. It was based on the eponymous novel by Richard Matheson.
• Hell is used as a plot subject in the Friday The 13th film Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
• Highway to Hell is a movie about a young guy driving down a certain highway at night going fast enough between 2 points to enter hell. He does so to save his girlfriend abducted by a hellcop.

Gaming

Roleplaying games

• In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, there are seven hellish planes, usually called the Lower Planes. The Plane most often referred to as 'Hell' is the Outer Plane Baator and comprises nine levels, sometimes called the Nine Hells or the Nine Hells of Baator. The other planes are Pandemonium, an endless underground network filled with howling winds that cause madness; the Abyss, a collection of countless places of evil and chaos, each one worse than the one before; Carceri, the prison of the multiverse; Hades, place of grey and bleak plains; the four peaks of the vulcans of Gehenna; and Archeron, a place of broken weapons and engines of war from all battlefields.
• In In Nomine, the forces of Heaven and Hell fight each other in a modern setting. Hell, the home location of all demons, is separated into several subdivisions called principalities, each ruled by one or more Demon Princes. All of Hell's principalities is named after a cultural version of hell (i.e., Hades, Sheol, Tartaurus, etc.) An additional area, known as lower hell, is where Lucifer resides.

Video games

• In Mortal Kombat, a version of Hell known as The Netherrealm exists, and is described as "the fiery depths of which are inhospitable to all but the most vile, a realm of demons and shadowy warriors"
• The 1996 city-building god game Afterlife has the player build Heaven and Hell as cities.
• In Bayonetta, Hell takes the form of a demonic realm called Inferno, a world inhabited by demons.
• The fantasy horror video game Dante's Inferno, based on Dante's depiction of Hell in the Divine Comedy, is exclusively set in Hell, fully realised in its medieval Roman Catholic conception as a physical and supernatural environment full of grotesque suffering and torture in correspondence with various sins.
• The video game series Devil May Cry features Hell as a location to battle through. The name of the main character Dante is a reference to The Divine Comedy, as is his twin brother Vergil.
• In the first of the Diablo series of games, a portion of hell is featured as a pit deep under the ground largely characterized as a place of suffering, as the bodies of hundreds of apparently tortured people reside there. The game manual refers to this place as actually part of the mortal realm whose barriers with the metaphysical Hell have weakened, causing it to take on hellish attributes combined with more worldly ones.
• The famous Doom series also involves the concept of Hell, but with a science-fiction twist, as a future teleportation experiment accidentally opens a gate to Hell, releasing demons. Hell is treated in the Christian conception, replete with Satanic symbols and corporeal demons, as a parallel universe of crimson skies, black mountains and oceans of fire. At the end of the second game in the series Hell is wrecked, and the main character wonders where evil people will go when they die. In Doom 3 the player must travel to Hell to obtain a powerful Martian artifact.
• The first Fear Effect game deals extensively with the Chinese concept of hell, replete with its aforementioned political ramifications. Several of the later levels actually take place in the Chinese hell.
• In Hellgate: London, demonic armies have emerged from hell to reduce London to ruin and are slowly converting the world through a process called "Hellforming". The protagonist must fight back the demonic invaders.
• Hell is portrayed as a battlefield frozen in time in the video game Painkiller. Everything from bullets to trenches to mushroom clouds are present in stark stasis, allowing the player to move about the vista to get a good look. The level culminates with a showdown with Satan himself.
• In the game Tony Hawk's Underground 2, there is an unlockable level (within 2 others) that depicts Hell. Little Demons, rural citizens, and a jazz dancing Satan are in the level.
• In Minecraft, players are able to create a portal to "The Nether", which is inspired by the classic "fire-and-brimstone" depiction of Hell.
• In the Heroes of Might and Magic series, Sheogh, the equivalent of Hell, is the home of the Inferno faction, a dark kingdom of demons.
• In the game Dwarf Fortress, Hell is blocked off from the overworld by semi-molted rock and the mythical Adamantine. Opening a pathway between the two unleashes a virtually endless amount of demons, effectively ending the game.
• In Super Meat Boy, Hell is the fourth chapter of the game. It is depicted as a dark reddish environment with lots of lava.
• In Saints Row: Gat out of Hell, The whole game takes place in a city set in hell.
• Skullgirls has a stage called Gehenna, which is made entirely of flesh, teeth, eyes, and a lake of blood. It is said to be the domain of the shapeshifter Double.

Literature

• Dante Alighieri's famous epic poem Divine Comedy tells how he visits Heaven and Hell. His visit to Hell is probably the most famous literary depiction of the concept. Hell has its entrance in the Northern hemisphere, the other side of the world to Purgatory, and the bottom of Hell is at the Centre of the Earth. Hell is systematically divided in thematical tortures for crimes of the same nature in its Nine Circles, for example people violent against others are trapped in the Seventh Circle of Hell in a boiling river of blood with centaurs firing arrows to keep them in their place. The people are judged by the Serpentine Minos. Hell was created by Lucifer's fall, he is now trapped in the final level for Traitors. Hell is surrounded by the river Acheron, the neutral sit on the banks chased by swarms of insects and running after a banner. Dante claims to have seen several famous people being tortured in hell: biblical characters (Judas, Cain, ...), mythological characters (Medusa, Minotaur,...), historical characters (Nero, Brutus, Attila the Hun,...) and people of his own lifetime. His journey is described with many imaginative details.
• In Milton's Paradise Lost, Lucifer and the other fallen angels (such as Beelzebub, Belial, and Molech) are imprisoned in Hell for rebelling against God after the birth of Christ. Hell is Nine days' fall from Heaven and three times further than Earth. Between it and the Universe are Chaos and Night. In Hell, the fallen angels build Pandaimoneum. Hell's gate is guarded by Sin, Satan's daughter. In Book 10 a bridge is built from Hell to Earth by Sin and Death after the Fall of Man, which has been caused by Lucifer, while the Fallen angels are turned into snakes.
• In Piers Anthony's series Incarnations of Immortality, Hell, along with Heaven and Purgatory, are actual locations populated by the main characters and souls of the dead.
• Wayne Barlowe's book, Gods Demon, is set in Hell and follows the endeavors of a powerful Demon, Sargatanas, to achieve redemption. The hell depicted is in many ways the classical Christian perception of burning cities and desolate wastelands with souls being routinely tortured.
• Stephen King suggests that Hell is repetition in his short story, "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French". The story focuses on a woman who is forced to repeat the first hours of her and her husband's doomed second honeymoon over and over.
• In the novel City Infernal by Edward Lee, as well as its sequels Infernal Angel and House Infernal, Hell is depicted as a modern metropolis (the Mephistopolis), albeit where electricity is provided by tapping the bio-electricity of tortured souls, chaos and suffering is systematically enforced, organic materials (bones, blood, et al.) are used for everything from food and building materials and everything in-between, and vicious horrors, both born and manufactured, run rampant, all of which serves as an affront to God. It's also said to exist in a version of Earth in a separate plane of existence, and that its dimensions are based on those of Heaven.
• Emanuel Swedenborg wrote Heaven and Hell in which he claimed to have visited Hell.

Music

Albums

• GWAR uses the word "hell" and related concepts in the albums titled Beyond Hell (2006) and Hell-O! (1988).
• Slayer's second studio album is titled Hell Awaits. Many of the band's other songs also have Hellish lyrical themes.
• The 2004 Insane Clown Posse album, Hell's Pit is a concept album about Hell.
• Bring Me the Horizon's third studio album, There Is a Hell, Believe Me I've Seen It. There Is a Heaven, Let's Keep It a Secret revolves around the themes of Heaven and Hell.
• The Venom album titled Welcome to Hell was released in 1981.
• Gary Numan's (Musical Artist) released the album 'Exile' in 1997 of which has very strong anti-Christian views on God and the acts of which God seems to 'permit' to happen on earth. Also contains lyrics claiming Numans personal dismissal of co-operating with God i.e. from the song 'The Angel Wars' - "I won't pray here or bow my head. I won't praise your name, I won't kneel down..." His newer albums, 'Pure' (2000) and 'Jagged' (2006) also put across songs with similar 'bases' but are not directly aimed at religion (specifically Christianity) and do not contain lyrics of personal 'conversations' with God or a similar nature.

Radio

• Bleak Expectations BBC Radio 4 series spoofs Dante's Inferno in the 2nd episode of the fourth series. The underworld is a place for all souls before they are assigned to their respective heavens or hells.
• The BBC Radio 4 comedy series Old Harry's Game is set in Hell. It was written by Andy Hamilton, who also stars as Satan.

Television

• In the Buffyverse, there are several places in the world that are natural gateways between the underworld and the world of mortals. One of these Hellmouths is located directly under the library of the Sunnydale High School. However, instead of there being one hell, there are hundreds of hell dimensions, in which demons are the dominant lifeform and non-demon life is subject to great torture. Precise details of Hell are unrevealed, but Angel was sent to a Hell dimension for around four months on Earth and is said to have experienced five hundred years of torment in that time, leaving him temporarily regressed to a feral mentality before he begins to recover. When Buffy returns from death in Season 6, her friends believer her shocked and unengaging behavior is due to her being in a Hell dimension.
• In Doctor Who, the Tenth Doctor comes across a being which identifies itself as 'the Beast', resembles popular interpretations of the Devil, and makes numerous references to Hell. In a later episode, "Hell" is said to be a synonym for The Void between dimensions, the coordinates of which are all sixes. The Void is nothingness, the place between Universes.
• In the science fiction series Lexx, Heaven and Hell are depicted as two joined planets situated in the darkest part of the Dark Zone. The hell planet is known as Planet Fire to its inhabitants. When a human who has made bad choices dies in the Lexx universe, their life essence is taken to the core of Fire. They are eternally reincarnated to suffer on the planet's surface. Hell is depicted as an endless burning desert, with distant towers dedicated to various types of punishment. The inhabitants have no memories of their resurrections or past lives, and exist in an ongoing cycle of suffering and death.
• The television series Supernatural mentions Hell many times as the place that demons originated- demons in this world being human souls broken by their torture in Hell- and shows the place in a couple of episodes. Protagonist Dean Winchester was sent to Hell after a demon deal where he experienced forty years of torture in four months, and his brother Sam was trapped in a deeper part of Hell under the personal attention of Lucifer for over a year on Earth before his soul was rescued by Death; their father-figure, Bobby Singer, experienced his own Hell where he was tormented by demonic versions of Sam and Dean until he was rescued by the real Sam.
• The television series Reaper has the main character Sam as a bounty hunter for the devil who must send escaped souls back to hell. Entrances to hell are places that are considered hell on Earth, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles and a storage center where multiple murder victims are hidden.
• In the American television supernatural drama Ghost Whisperer, "Hell" is depicted as the place where ghosts go if they do not cross over into the light and instead go to the Dark Side.
• In the British science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf several characters make reference to "Silicon Hell", the presumed alternative the concept of "Silicon Heaven" programmed into most artificially intelligent devices in order to preserve their loyalty to humanity.