With ‘Baskin’ re-opening the doors to damnation, we look at some of the best horror films involving gateways to Hell!
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
As a people, we have an inherit fascination with Hell. The idea of there being some dominion where not only the evilest amongst us end up, but also a place where demons and monsters run free spreading havoc. With Hell being an appropriately frightening place, most of pop culture’s association with the purgatory is in regard to avoiding the place; to escaping the prison; to never ending up there in the first place. That’s why it’s so fascinating when a literal gateway to Hell opens up in some horror story. The idea of this impossibly cursed world just rubbing up against our own and spilling out is truly terrifying. It’s an idea that’s so jarring there are even a number of sites in the real world that people are quick to designate as actual Hellmouths.
The recent Turkish horror film, Baskin, shows fascination with similar concepts as police officers doing a routine investigation of a house end up stumbling into an opening to Hell in its basement. Baskin explores this exploration into the unknown with a stunning, disturbing poignancy. In honor of Baskin reminding us all how effective a good encounter with damnation can be, here are some of the best horror movies that involve a gateway to Hell!
7. As Above, So Below
As Above, So Below gets points right from the start for being loosely based on the alleged “actual” gateway to Hell rumored to be within the Paris catacombs (the film was actually shot within the catacombs too, which is pretty impressive). The film might ultimately fall short in comparison to other similar cavernous horror like The Descent, but this is the only one of the lot that ends up tying into Hell. The film sees a team braving the Paris catacombs on a rather ridiculous mission to find this Holy Grail of alchemy, a stone that will turn lead into gold or silver. The film goes one step further with the relic also granting eternal life and it being a constant beacon to heal people throughout the film. It’s one thing to stumble into Hell, but that’s some rather fantastical business.
As the team treks deeper into the darkness, disturbing images like fanatical cultists, visions of demons, and their worst fears personified come out. This is very much the version of Hell that tests your mettle and tries to get inside your head. As the crew gets deeper underground a rather familiar greeting appears, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” which will either have you pleasantly smirking or rolling your eyes.
John Erick Dowdle’s picture does decide to go the found footage route, but it’s at least got some creative spins on the format, with touches like mounting cameras on the group’s helmets going far. Dowdle is someone that’s shown he knows what he’s doing and while many people will bring up his films Quarantine or Devil as deterrents, As Above feels much more reminiscent of his underrated The Poughkeepsie Tapes. While a flawed film, it’s still one with plenty of character and it’s ending is one that will no doubt stay with you.
6. Amityville 3D (AKA, III: The Demon)
Okay, full discretion, Amityville 3D isn’t winning any awards. It’s certainly one of the blander outings in the Amityville series and the body count is much lower and infrequent than it should be. While these misgivings paired with some unfortunate 3D effects give the film a campy charm, it still does manage to do a number of things right. One of those elements being its incorporation of its door to the underworld. The film’s final act reveals that all of the house’s demonic activity is courtesy of a well in the basement that’s actually a gateway to Hell. The film is a little vague with the specifics of it, but with the monsters that come out of the hole paired with the flames that later shoot out of it, it feels like a logical conclusion. I also really dig the idea of a haunted house’s activity being due to a doorway to another world rather than the typical murder leading to ghosts situation.
In spite of the interesting take on Hell gateways that is hinted at in the film’s end, it’s a real spectacle to get to that point. The story sees a journalist who’s been trying to debunk the Amityville legend (loosely based on real-life Stephen Kaplan) ending up acquiring the house and moving in. The things you’re probably going to remember the most here are that ridiculous death courtesy of a swarm of flies, a homemade Ouija board, and the fact that a young Meg Ryan and Lori Loughlin (Full House, Fuller House) round out the cast of precocious teens. The Amityville has such a bizarre litany of sequels that this one is still worth checking out for the curiosity factor, but barely. If nothing else may this film make you imagine a Full House series going on in the Amityville house. Start writing that fan fiction, guys!
5. The Sentinel
The Sentinel is an odd little horror film from the ‘70s that you might have never even heard about, even though it boasts the likes of people like Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, and Burgess Meredith in its cast. It even has one of the more original plots from out of these films where a model moves into a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn that turns out to be owned by disgraced priests with the building being a gateway to Hell. It’s something that almost feels downright Polanski-esque or verging on Argento’s work in its execution, which is never a bad thing either.
The Sentinel actually goes to some pretty bizarre places. Alison, the model, continues to pry into the building’s history, which results in her learning that the blind excommunicated priest who owns the building is actually a gatekeeper. His job is to police the Hell opening and make sure that no demons escape, but now that his life is coming to an end, the gateway is in need of a new Sentinel, with Alison being their selection. That’s actually a concept I’m super into and The Sentinel doesn’t shy away from tapping into how bleak of a story this is (it also taunts Alison over her past suicide attempts, turning it into an even more grim survivor’s guilt parable). The passage towards the end where Hell literally breaks loose and chases a desperate Alison through the apartment building is also an effectively frightening high note—not to mention controversial one (people with real deformities were cast as these demons)—for the film to go out on.
4. The Gate
Honestly, this selection just as easily could have been Polanski’s Johnny Depp vehicle, The Ninth Gate, but these films are about the same in quality, and you’re probably more familiar with Polanski’s entry. If not, it’s one of the more unfortunate outings from the later stage of the director’s career that involves assembling the right relics and conducting a ritual to open the ninth gate to Hell and pass over into the purgatory. Besides, you don’t want that melodramatic mess; this film has rambunctious pre-teens encountering a doorway to Hell in their very own backyard!
This film is all over the place in the best possible way. After an unusual combination of lightning, geodes, and bloodletting, the hole in the backyard starts to become suspicious to our protagonists. After it’s given up a sacrifice, the gateway activates and everything starts to go wrong. And I mean everything in the truest sense. There are shape-shifting demon dopplegangers here, swarms of locusts, run of the mill giant monster snakes, Old God references, dog corpses in your bed, and so much more. This film throws a lot at you and really takes advantage of the sort of unusual disturbance that a gateway to the underworld could be capable of causing. For those eager for more of these heightened antics, there’s also (thankfully) a Gate II: Trespassers out there.
3. The Beyond
Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond is the title getting the spotlight here, but really any of the films from the directors “Gates of Hell” trilogy (City of the Living Dead and House by the Cemetery being the other two) qualify quite nicely, aptly enough. Fulci’s picture begins in the ‘20s where a murder by a lynch mob (of someone who might be a warlock) within a hotel ends up opening one of the Seven Doors of Death, a Hell gate conduit for the dead to cross over. Decades later when the hotel is reacquired and reopened, the recent activity stirs up the inevitable and soon the separation between Hell and the land of the living is tenuous at best. At the film’s climax a hospital is literally overrun with zombies so things get out of hand.
Fulci is known for his over-the-top gore and giallo sensibilities with The Beyond not disappointing in that regard. There’s of course the now famous “eye splinter” scene, but other creative takes on the gateway to damnation keep the film entertaining. Deaths courtesy of things like spiders, acid, and renegade dogs all add a very specific voice to the film that isn’t afraid to show off what it’s capable of. As it also seems to be tradition with these films, The Beyond also sports a real downer of an ending where nobody wins and yet another chilling reminder of how vacuous and powerful Hell can be.
2. Event Horizon
Colloquially referred to as “Hellraiser in Space,” it’s a more than fair comparison point and it’s not hard to see how Paul W.S. Anderson was eventually given the keys to the Resident Evil cinematic franchise due to work like this. Event Horizon is surely the most creative concept on the list, ditching contemporary trappings like hotels, apartment buildings, or suburban homes for its Hell gates and instead taking this madness to outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Set in the year 2047, the film sees a standard rescue mission being initiated upon a wrecked ship, the Event Horizon. It’s learned that the ship’s purposes was to test a new sort of gravity drive that essentially creates an artificial black hole allowing transport between two vast distances. The brilliant development that’s fallen upon here is that this black hole is actually an opening into Hell itself.
This strong concept more or less morphs into the space ship becoming “possessed” by this demonic force and waging war with the susceptible crew that’s inside. Anderson does strong work illustrating the space madness that strikes everyone. The performances are all great and it’s not hard to believe that this film was one of the prime influences for the popular survival horror video game series, Dead Space.
What I love about this movie (which is more than worth a re-watch at this point if you’ve been lukewarm on the endeavor) is that the glimpses of Hell that it shows you are so detailed and graphic, but they assault you at such a quick, visceral level it’s almost connecting on more of a psychological level. Your brain is completing the images for you as this horror just seeps in your mind and doesn’t get a chance to properly process. There are lengthy deleted scenes that are set within the Hell-verse that are some beautiful work and show off Anderson’s early ability, and yet he shows restraint by removing them from the picture. Less is more a lot of the time, and Event Horizon becomes more powerful by hinting at the horrors shown in Hell rather than full-out splashing around in its puddles of blood.
1. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
And speaking of puddles of blood…Clive Barker’s original Hellraiser is a classic, but its sequel does exactly what it should by actually going to Hell and doubling down on all of the delicious cenobite lore. Barker’s world is truly a disgusting, unsettling one with Hellraiser II embracing all of that in such a loving way. There are likely just as many characters without skin in this film as there are with. The murders are all grisly in a very vicious sort of way, and Dr. Channard’s metamorphosis into the new de facto Pinhead is the stuff of nightmares.
Hellraiser II does an excellent job at continuing Kirsty’s tragic story, just like the follow-ups to Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street respect their original Final Girls. What’s kind of cool about Hellbound though is that there are essentially two gateways to Hell that are present here. The first being the bloody mattress that Kirsty’s mother killed herself on in the original film—and really, what’s a more evocative gateway to Hell then a mattress soaked in blood? The other doorway being the result of the Lament Configuration puzzle box being completed successfully and literal openings to the afterlife appear so that the cenobites can deal with this disturbance.
Hellraiser II is a crucial stepping stone for the franchise and a rather formative work in terms of representations of Hell, too. Not to mention that the idea of Hell merely being one small dominion (and cenobites just being one species amongst many) amongst a larger Hellscape is such a rich premise. What’s my pleasure? That’s my pleasure.
Let it also be clear that all of these selections feature specifically a gateway to Hell. There are many more capable films that simply take place in Hell, feature scenes in Hell, or some other variation on the idea, but this list is looking at a very specific qualifier. With Baskin seeing rave reviews, hopefully it will reignite people’s interest with telling these interesting sort of horror film where the impossible ends up invading the ordinary.
Let’s just hope that whatever’s waiting on the other side looks a whole lot more pleasing than a cenobite.
