There’s been a lot of people saying that Hellraiser Judgment has the scariest portrayal of Hell, but I don’t think it’s even in the top 5…
So, I don’t know about you, but this clip from Hellraiser: Judgment has popped up a lot for me recently, claiming to be the scariest depiction of Hell. And you know what, it doesn’t even crack the top five. It wants Hell to look like what you’d imagine it to be. Sure, it looks kind of cool, but it’s just elevated red guys with pitchforks: the judges, the rituals, the pageantry, the implication of a cosmic legal system run by Spirit Halloween dummies.
Because the scariest depictions of Hell don’t usually feel like a place with staff and procedures. They don’t feel like a grimdark office building with a torture wing run by a guy with an admittedly sick goatee. The moment Hell has a clear chain of command, it becomes understandable, and understanding can really numb the dread. If Hell has rules you can learn, then it’s a system. And systems can be navigated. You might not win, but your brain can begin doing what it always does: mapping exits, predicting outcomes, looking for loopholes. The horror becomes logistical, like a problem that can be solved.
That’s why Judgment and films like it miss the point. They confuse shock with dread. They go for imagery that plays well in a short clip. Damnation for the TikTok generation. But Hell, as an idea, is terrifying because it’s not a clip. It’s duration. It’s the threat of forever. You can’t make “forever” scary by showing someone being punished for thirty seconds. You make it scary by suggesting there is no frame you can step outside of, no vantage point from which it becomes manageable.
The best films that depict Hell understand that, and they tend to do one of two things. They either make Hell feel like a place where meaning has been stripped out entirely, or they make it feel like the most personal mirror imaginable, one that reflects what you’ve spent your life avoiding until you can’t look away anymore. Sometimes, the most effective portrayals do both at once: they annihilate meaning, yet somehow personalise it. So with that in mind, here’s some movies I like that actually make Hell feel like a fucking nightmare.
Take Jigoku, which I watched for the first time researching this video, and it’s already one of my favourites. Jigoku’s Hell isn’t cinematic in the modern sense. It isn’t interested in spectacle. It’s interested in inevitability. The punishments are grotesque, but what makes them so effective is how unromantic they are. The film doesn’t treat suffering as a set piece. Hell isn’t an escape room or Saw trap. It treats it as a state of being. It’s repetitive, almost procedural, like Hell has been running so long it no longer needs creativity. And that really sticks with you. The idea that Hell isn’t fussed with innovation or finding new ways to torture, rather it’s an oppressive persistance without end.
There’s also something pretty devastating about how Jigoku frames damnation as an ecosystem. People don’t arrive in Hell and immediately understand it. They drift through it, broken and confused, like they’re waking up into an existence where pain is normal and relief is a myth. It’s not the violence that makes it hard to shake; it’s the absence of mercy as a concept. Watching it, you realise the film isn’t trying to scare you with the idea of punishment, it’s scaring you with the idea of no conclusion. Hell as an endless present tense.
It’s also quite clear that people who say Hellraiser: Judgment has the scariest version of Hell haven’t seen the original, as that’s way more effective. Thanks to frankly too many sequels and diminishing returns, Hellraiser is probably more known now for its gore and iconic monsters. But what makes it frightening is its metaphysics. Hellraiser doesn’t depict Hell as a courtroom; it depicts Hell as a door you open yourself. That’s such a smarter, nastier idea. There’s no grand moral verdict handed down by judges in robes or pretty cool little glasses. There’s just appetite. Curiosity. Obsession. The desire to go beyond ordinary sensation and touch something “more,” whatever that means.
The Cenobites don’t arrive like police. Especially in the first film, they arrive like specialists. Calm, composed, almost courteous. They speak as if you’ve already agreed to the terms and conditions, because you have, just without reading them. That’s what makes Hellraiser’s Hell so effective: it isn’t based on sin, it’s based on want. It suggests that damnation doesn’t require you to be evil; it only requires you to be human in the specific way that keeps reaching for the forbidden door handle. Watching it now, what unsettles me isn’t the hooks or how a skinless man sits down without leaving a stain, it’s the implication that the worst consequences aren’t always punishment. Sometimes they’re fulfilment.
And that’s where Judgment feels like it’s trying to retrofit a modern “lore-heavy” Hell onto a concept that was always more disturbing when it stayed intimate and abstract. The moment you turn the underworld into an institution, you’ve traded existential horror for worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is fun. It’s also the opposite of terror. Terror thrives in the spaces where explanation fails.
Event Horizon understands this perfectly. If Hellraiser makes Hell intimate, Event Horizon makes it cosmic. And that’s arguably even worse. This film’s Hell isn’t religious, moral, or even particularly theatrical. It’s a dimension, an elsewhere, where the laws that allow human sanity to function simply do not apply. Crucially, the film doesn’t show you enough to make it familiar. It offers fragments: flashes of screaming bodies, violent impressions, a sense that what happened “over there” was not merely torture, but a kind of metaphysical dissolution.
What makes Event Horizon’s depiction of Hell so haunting is that it weaponises the mind’s need to interpret. You don’t see the whole thing, so your brain builds it for you, and it always builds something worse. The film suggests that Hell might be the condition of being forced to experience everything you are trying not to feel, guilt, shame, grief, without the protective layer of reality. It’s not “fire and brimstone”; it’s “your interior life, uncontained, forever.” And the most unsettling idea in the film is that Hell might be less a place of judgement than a place of exposure: reality stripped down to raw sensation and raw truth. A realm where the concept of “coping” doesn’t exist.
What’s really Hell though, is knowing there’s so many more scenes from this movie that’ve been lost on the cutting room floor. I want more grungy, late 90s cyber gore please.
Then you have As Above, So Below, which I honestly think is one of the most underrated horror films of the 2010s. Its Hell is effective because it’s personal in a way most cinematic Hells avoid. The film leans into an old spiritual idea: that the underworld isn’t just beneath us physically, it’s beneath us psychologically. As the characters descend into the catacombs, the environment begins to respond not just to their presence, but to their histories. It’s as if the place is reading them.
That’s terrifying because it reframes Hell as a diagnostic space. It doesn’t torture you randomly; it locates the exact fault lines in your identity and presses on them. You can fight a demon. You can’t fight a landscape that embodies your unresolved guilt. And the best moments in the film aren’t the jump scares, they’re the moments where the characters realise the maze isn’t a maze at all, it’s a moral and emotional recursion. The only way out is through the thing you’ve been avoiding, and the film quietly implies that some people simply can’t do that. Not because they’re weak, but because they’re human.
Fulci’s The Beyond presents Hell as something even colder: not a personalised mirror, but an absence of structure altogether. The Beyond feels like being trapped inside a nightmare that refuses to resolve into meaning. It denies you the comfort of rules. There’s no clear moral calculus. There’s no sense that choices will save you if you make the right ones. Hell here is entropy, reality unraveling, logic collapsing, a gate opening onto something that cannot be reasoned with.
The ending is what lingers. Not because it shocks you, but because it empties you. It’s one of those finales that feels genuinely terminal, like the film has backed you into a corner where storytelling itself can’t help anymore. And that’s a profoundly unsettling thing for a movie to do. Most horror films ultimately reassure you, even if they pretend not to. They remind you there are rules, even if the rules are cruel. The Beyond refuses that reassurance. It suggests that Hell might simply be the point at which meaning stops.
And then there’s What Dreams May Come, which is arguably the most disturbing portrayal on this list precisely because it doesn’t behave like horror. It doesn’t need demons, rituals, or screaming choirs. It depicts Hell as grief turned into geography, an internal state externalised, a place you inhabit because you can’t imagine leaving it. The terror here is emotional rather than visceral, and it lands because it feels recognisable. It isn’t asking you to fear punishment. It’s asking you to fear the idea that despair can become self-sustaining, that a mind can build a prison so convincing it becomes reality.
That’s the point where cinematic Hell becomes truly frightening: when it stops being about external torment and becomes about the self. Because an external Hell is, in a strange way, comforting. It implies someone is in charge. Someone has decided what’s fair. Someone is handing down sentences. A personal Hell suggests something worse: that the universe doesn’t need to punish you at all. You can do it yourself, perfectly, without supervision.
So when I say Hellraiser: Judgment doesn’t crack the top five, it’s not me being contrarian for the sake of it. It’s because its Hell is too legible. Too presentable. It has a vibe that plays well in a short social media clip, because it reads instantly as “this is Hell.” But the scariest depictions of Hell aren’t the ones you recognise on sight. They’re the ones that don’t fully reveal themselves, the ones that deny you the ability to map them, the ones that suggest eternity isn’t dramatic, it’s inescapable.
The real nightmare isn’t flames. It isn’t judges. It isn’t elaborate torture devices or demonic speeches about eternal suffering. The real nightmare is duration without meaning. It’s repetition without relief. It’s identity being worn down until you can’t remember what you were before. It’s a place that doesn’t care about your guilt because it has all the time in the world to make you feel it anyway.
And that’s why the best cinematic Hells don’t go viral in neat little clips. They don’t fit into thirty seconds. They don’t perform. They seep into you slowly, like cold, and you only realise how far they’ve gotten when the movie ends and you’re still sitting there, thinking, against your will, “Right. Okay. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all.”
While you’re here, please subscribe to Upside Down Shark on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts!
Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
[…] there’s Event Horizon, which I also recently talked about in our video on the scariest portrayals of Hell. A rescue crew investigates a spaceship that vanished after experimenting with faster-than-light […]