Movies and other works of fiction that include scenes that take place in hell -- for example, Constantine; What Dreams May Come; Spawn; the Hellraiser movies; and even TV's Angel -- tend to present hell as an adventuresome place that's filled with interesting scenery and events. Those who are trapped there may be suffering and miserable, but at least their lives -- afterlives? -- are filled with excitement so they are never bored. Dante's hell certainly was chock full of drama. Usually it's heaven that's conceived as boring (although I myself attribute this cynical attitude to a failure of imagination).
The only description of hell that I know of, as a, well, hellishly boring place, is in an Asimov story I read once -- it may have been 'The Last Trump', but don't quote me -- in which the dead are resurrected and at first people think the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, but then literally everything else, including the landscape, starts to crumble away, condemning humanity to an eternity of nothing but each other, and they realize they are in hell.
But for me personally, the most truly effective -- frightening, that is -- depiction of hell is the one that comes, appropriately enough, at the end of the Michael J. Fox movie The Frighteners. I've only seen the movie once, a long time ago -- I don't recall the characters' names or even the scenes very well -- but the evil psycho couple get their just deserts when the space they are standing in metamorphoses into a giant throat and they are swallowed down into a very confining and personal hell.
That scene stayed with me because being trapped in a tight space is one of my worst fears. Seeing someone buried alive in a coffin, and seeing it from their perspective, as happened with the characters played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2; Jennifer Garner in an episode of Alias; and Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire ("Eternity in a box!") is just about the worst thing I can think of seeing in a movie. I once read of a mafioso being welded into a drum barrel, and sincerely hoped they'd at least killed the guy first. A similar scene is shown in Tank Girl, in which the heroine is passed through a transparent pipe that narrows until she can hardly move or even breathe.
My worst, most horrifying fantasy combines elements of those scenes with a very personal fear. In this nightmare scenario, a group of demons are digging a narrow hole in the floor of a cave. They dig it miles deep, or perhaps light-years deep. Then a victim is brought in. He is bound tightly and his eyes are held open with wire. He is forced into a steel capsule, a cylinder just wide and long enough to wedge him in tightly, with a small glass window at eye level. The demons seal the capsule tight, then turn it upside down and drop it down the hole, which is just wide enough to allow it to slide down. There is a small light inside the capsule so that the victim, unable to move and nearly choking from the cramped, upside-down position, can -- must -- see through the window the wall of earth sliding past him as he drops. When the capsule comes to a crashing stop at the bottom, the demons fill up the hole, smooth the earth over it so it cannot ever be found, and leave. Inside the capsule, the light never burns out or runs out of power, so that the victim is forced to look at the earth inches from his eyes forever, unable to even close his eyes and imagine he is somewhere else. The final flourish (not really necessary, but the movie in my head is still playing) -- the camera pulls back and back, eventually revealing that now the entire universe consists of solid rock, and the prisoner entombed in the tiny bubble of space is the only object that exists in it.
As if that weren't enough, I came up with another version of hell today (well, yesterday; it's past 1:00 AM now -- and good God, what a masochist I am). This one is not as immediately, urgently restricting, but it's also very confining in its own way.
In this scenario, you find yourself in a long, narrow corridor. It's so narrow that you have to draw your arms in to keep from grazing the walls, or stand sideways. And it's very long. In fact, it stretches on and on and on, perfectly straight and antiseptically smooth, forever. There are no windows, doorways or any features other than a continuous line of lights overhead, lighting the infinite corridor with a bright, even light.
You look down the corridor and see that it really does stretch on endlessly, the walls converging toward a point that's far too distant to see clearly. You turn around and look in the opposite direction, and you can see the corridor goes on forever that way, too -- except, way off in the distance, far far away, maybe there is something there..?
Curious, you start to walk toward it.
After a little while though, you realize that it seems to be closer than it should be; at the pace you're walking, it should still be far away, but it looks much bigger than it did before and now you can sort of make out some ominous features on the thing. Is it moving toward you? You stop, a little alarmed, and watch.
After some moments you are certain that, yes, the thing really is coming toward you at a steady clip, and soon enough you can see exactly what it is and the fist of sudden terror claps itself around your chest as you realize that it's your worst fear made loathsome flesh. Maybe it's a rotting zombie with arms outstretched to grab, or a mutant monster with big misplaced eyes and a gaping mouth full of fangs; a walking skeleton trailing grave-dirt, a man-sized mass of spiders and maggots, or even a pale Asian girl ghost with long, disheveled hair obscuring her face, walking with an odd, jerky gait and making a garbled attempt to say your name in a choked voice.
You whirl around and start running, bumping into the walls and scraping your arms raw. You run and run until you're out of breath and you have to slow to a walk, nursing your aching side. You look back to check and note with panic that while the run has increased the gap between you and the Thing, you are tired and must walk slowly, while your pursuer is still coming for you at the same relentless pace. You turn and start to half-walk, half-trot, with the dismaying knowledge that you will never be able to stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment