There have been many stories and works of art depicting what Hell is like, the trick is to create a version on film that doesn’t look like a bunch of artificial sets. That is the challenge taken up by Japanese filmmaker Nobuo Nakagawa, known as the father of the Japanese horror film. It promises a journey into Hell and delivers with an interesting structure, taking the time to set up some characters and demonstrating how Japan’s version of Hell is culturally different. This removes the torture porn aspect of the finale.
Nakagawa and his creative team offer up a visionary tour de force. Hell is highly stylized, but not over-the-top like Hausu. The colors are supersaturated, and the imagery has an unrelenting drive, like being pushed through an extreme haunted house before being spat into a hot lava jacuzzi. Before Jigoku, Japanese Horror was closer in style to the subtlety of ghost stories. In the years since, there have been other attempts to literalize Hell, including a couple of remakes. The only one that can be compared to Jigoku is a segment from V/H/S/99 called “To Hell and Back”, which was made by Vanessa and Jospeh Winter (Deadstream).
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