If There's a Hell Below: Jigoku and Japanese Horror

Many people ease into Halloween by watching a scary movie or two. They might be classicists and opt for Universal horror like James Whale's Frankenstein films or Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula. Gentle souls might opt for a haunted romance like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, while cineastes will choose Kubrick's The Shining or William Friedkin's The Exorcist. Millennials who think they invented irony will go straight to the Scream franchise or horror comedies like Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead.

More specifically a Japanese hell, as imagined in Nobuo Nakagawa's cult classic Jigoku, which was given the Criterion treatment nearly twenty years ago, putting a once hard-to-find film in a context that includes Japanese new wave films like Woman in the Dunes and The Pornographers and the later explosion of "J-Horror" that includes pictures as different as Battle Royale, Ringu and Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

But mostly I want to see how much interest there is in a film that leaves more dead bodies on the stage at the end than Shakespeare and spends its final act in the infernal region beyond the grave, whose points of interest include, among other things, a river of pus.

Jigoku was the last gasp of Shintoho, a studio on the verge of bankruptcy when Nakagawa started filming in early 1960. The studio had begun with a labour dispute at Toho Studios just after World War II, when a group of employees split off ("Shintoho" literally means "New Toho") and it started promisingly, releasing early films by directors who would become Japanese cinema legends – Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog and Kon Ichikawa's Design of a Human Being (both 1949) and Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu (1952).

Sounds like a scary movie.

I was surprised to read of Buddhist Hell, (Naraka) and it sounds bad. Lots of hot and cold levels for torture.

I read dating the idea of hell within Buddhist tradition proves to be difficult, since ideas were orally transmitted until about 100 BCE when the Pali canon (their scriptures) was written down in Ceylon.

The eight hot naraka appear in Jātaka texts and form the basis of the hell system in Mahayana Buddhism. According to them, the hells are located deep under the southern continent of Jambudvīpa, denoting India.

So Buddhist hell is under India. That to me struck me as kind of funny.

Hell is below India. Wonder how the people of India feel about that idea.

Considering how many civilizations had a belief in hell, in all the different forms they come up with, it does not appear to be a deterent to bad behavior.

Christian hell, the ‘underworld’ is believed to be below the ground, or as some believe, the center of the Earth. I always thought that interesting, it’s smaller down there, I would think would be pretty crowded, everyone who ever existed if they are to go to hell go to a smaller place than the surface of the earth. There is sufficient room.

Unlike most of the earth's surface where people live mostly in two dimensions, Hell could use all of the space available. I had a calculation made of how many 6' 200 pounders could fit in the core. They are already dead, so breathing is not an issue, and we don't care about comfort. (This is also not really being able to understand what the nature of a post-death soul would take up in space.)

1 cubic mile = 147,197,952,000 cubic feet.
Therefore, 163 billion cubic miles × 147,197,952,000 = 2.4 × 10²² cubic feet.
Divide this by 2.5 cubic feet per person → ≈ 9.6 × 10²¹ human bodies.

So, approximately 9.6 sextillion
(9,600,000,000,000,000,000,000) average‑sized humans could theoretically fit inside Earth’s core.

The Thermodynamics of Hell

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so profound that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:

If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you”, and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting Oh my God.

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