NAKAA Islanders in Micronesia believe that Nakaa, the god of the harvest, punishes evil souls in the afterlife. Nakaa sits at the edge of the spirit world where all departing souls must pass after death. The spirits of those who have led good and decent lives are allowed to pass and enjoy paradise. But when Nakaa detects a wicked soul approaching, he throws an enchanted net over the spirit, trapping it forever. Rather than finding peace in death, such souls struggle for eternity in a vain attempt to free themselves.
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES In the age of technology, literally thousands of people have been declared clinically dead only to be revived, usually with the assistance of sophisticated medical equipment. Many of these “death survivors” report having what is now termed a near-death experience in which they witness some vision of the afterlife. Most describe these happenings as joyful episodes of peace, warmth, and light. However, a growing number of such resuscitated patients are coming forward with dark stories of horrifying hells.
The details vary from person to person, but all dark descents have one thing in common: They leave the revived patient frantic for a second chance at redemption. Specifics about the underworld cover a variety of tortures, ranging from intense loneliness to imprisonment in a molten cage. One woman recalls an overwhelming sense of “chaos, confusion,” complete with shrieks and screams so loud she felt unbearably disoriented. Others echo the sense of anxiety that permeates the soul, followed by a crushing despair.
Recollections of journeys to the “other side” are not new to this age. Centuries ago, VISION LITERATURE abounded, with hundreds of people claiming to have visited heaven, hell, and purgatory, usually under the guidance of some astral mentor. But modern accounts differ in that many have been related by avowed atheists and skeptics who considered belief in God to be baseless superstition. Among these contemporary converts are Canadian farmer GEORGE GODKIN, renowned surgeon MAURICE RAWLINGS, and respected college professor HOWARD STORM. Before the terrifying episodes, none of these men would have called himself “religious.”
Dr. John Weldon, author of more than forty books on comparative religion, suggests that virtually all near-death experiences originate with SATAN. He believes that beautiful afterlife “visions” lull people into the false belief that there is a “tunnel of light” waiting to transport deceased spirits to paradise for reunions with friends and family. Such reassurances give the impression that living a life of virtue and seeking divine forgiveness for sins are unnecessary. Hunt further objects to the Heavenly Father being reduced to an impersonal “white light” promising nondescript salvation.
Those who have come forward with stories of damnation to the underworld believe that their experiences are not uncommon. Because of the moral implications of being sent to hell, experts who specialize in studying near-death experiences agree that most people are unwilling to admit they have been condemned. Thus infernal sojourns are thought to be at least as prevalent, if not more so, as “positive” visions of salvation. Such tales seem rare only because the attached stigma shames many into keeping silent about what they have encountered in the next realm.
NERGAL Negral is an ancient Sumerian god whose lecherous appetites result in his eternal damnation. Tricked into trusting the underworld goddess ERESHKIGAL, Nergal reluctantly agrees to marry the fiend and take his place as king of the dead.
According to the legend, the cunning Ereshkigal becomes jealous when she discovers that the heavenly deities are enjoying a lavish gala and she has not been invited. The gods reply that it would be impossible for her to attend, since she cannot leave her underworld kingdom of ARALU, the Land of Darkness. Refusing to be ignored, Ereshkigal sends an ambassador to represent her and bring back a sampling of celestial delights.
When Nergal, the god of hunting and war, sees that Ereshkigal has never sent a lesser spirit on her behalf, he mocks them both. The enraged Ereshkigal demands that he come in person to the underworld to apologize for his rudeness. Nergal protests, but the rest of the gods insist that he do so in order to avoid bringing her wrath on all of them. They give him a stern warning: Do not accept anything offered in Aralu, or else he will become a prisoner of the land of the dead.
Nergal makes the journey and is steadfast in resisting the treats Ereshkigal offers him. He refuses the food, the wine, even the water. But when Ereshkigal offers her body to him, he succumbs. Nergal enjoys a week-long sexual escapade with Ereshkigal, then tells her he must return to the higher world. She laughs at this, informing Nergal that his seduction has made him her subject, and he must now remain in Aralu. His pleas for release are in vain; Ereshkigal is determined to keep Nergal as her prisoner.
Misrable in Aralu, Nergal tries to trick her into allowing him to return to the Great Above. He tells Ereshkigal that he has fallen in love with her and wants to be wed, and he begs her to let him share news of their engagement with the other gods. Obviously skeptical of his sincerity and commitment, she lets him go but warns that if he fails to return promptly she will seek vengeance.
Nergal hurries back to the palace of the gods and tries to disguise himself so Ereshkigal cannot find him. But when she threatens to “let loose the dead to devour the living,” the gods pressure him to surrender. Pouting and outwitted, Nergal returns to the Land of Darkness to rule with Ereshkigal. His lordship is in title only, as Ereshkigal refuses to share power over the dead with him.
Another ancient tale recounts a nightmarish vision of Nergal in Aralu. According to the story, an Assyrian prince has a dream in which he visits Nergal in the underworld. Little is known of the details of his passage, but the prince’s terrified bride reported that he woke up screaming and shaking uncontrollably. He refused to tell her what he had seen, but he spent the rest of his life in terror of the horrors awaiting him after death.
NIFLHEIM The Germanic underworld Niflheim is a cold realm of icy suffering. Souls of those who die by any means other than in battle (warrior heroes go to the paradise Valhalla) are sent to Niflheim, a name that means “Land of the Mists.” It is a dreary, dark place of everlasting winter where a poisonous fountain spews rivers of ice. The entrance to Niflheim is GNIPAHELLI, a cavernous passage that leads to the underworld.
Niflheim is ruled by HEL, a hideous goddess who is half human and half green, rotting corpse. Her odor is almost as disgusting as her appearance. She is the daughter of the trickster god LOKI and an ogress. Hel’s palace, Sleetcold, overlooks the vast wasteland of ice, where the damned cry out in eternal agony. She is aided by Hermodr, a messenger who carries the dead to the underworld. The souls of immoral people wash up on the haunted shore Nastrond and are then delivered to Hel for punishment. Wicked souls are tortured by Nidhoggr, a dragon who lives near the lowest circle of the underworld. The “corpse tearer” continually feeds on the spirits of evil people.
NIGHT ANGEL The 1990 horror film Night Angel depicts the modern escapades of LILITH, an ancient SUCCUBUS who destroys men through sexual domination. In the movie’s most memorable sequence, the voluptuous DEMON takes her prey on a tour of hell to lure him into her nefarious scheme.
Night Angel opens as Lilith (played by Isa Anderson) claws her way up from the underworld, emerging from a cemetery in present-day California. As she rises, the shrieks of the damned can be heard emanating from the steamy chasm below her. Covered in maggots and mud, Anderson prowls the streets beneath the full moon, her very presence causing a rash of crib deaths, rapes, and murders. She disappears into the night, the sounds of screams echoing throughout the town.
Anderson takes a job on the staff of Siren, a trendy fashion magazine. She immediately begins seducing fellow employees one at a time. Each sexual encounter ends with a brutal murder in which Anderson mutilates her prey. “Lust,” viewers learn, “is her life force.” The surviving coworkers suffer increasingly disturbing nightmares but continue to be drawn to the alluring Anderson. Finally, the fiend attempts to win the allegiance of one particularly attractive colleague by taking him to an orgy in hell.
The infernal tour commences when a picture of Anderson wrapped in a snake comes alive in the back room of a cocktail bar. She then descends a winding staircase, past deviants having sex with dismembered body parts, men lashed to poles by barbed wire wrapped tightly around their heads, and revelers guzzling green, bubbling potions while feasting on human flesh. One scene shows an obese woman fondling her enormous bosom, rolling her breasts upward to reveal screaming faces where her nipples should be. The pit of hell resembles a medieval torture chamber replete with whips, chains, and leather-hooded GHOULS. (Credits for this underworld sequence list “people in bondage,” “woman with faces under breasts,” and “man being served on table.”)
Night Angel’s hell is a sensual, lewd underworld of sexual obsession, similar in many ways to the infernal realm of CLIVE BARKER’s 1987 HELLRAISER. Both films focus on the dark dimension as a place of ultimate physical gratification, where carnal fulfillment is, in the end, horribly painful.
NIGHT GALLERY Night Gallery, a collection of supernatural stories, served as Rod Serling’s follow-up to his phenomenally successful THE TWILIGHT ZONE television series. After The Twilight Zone was canceled in 1964, Serling worked on radio programs, wrote several anthologies, and adapted novels for the screen (including the 1967 Planet of the Apes), but he shied away from what he called “walking dead and maggots” shows about fiends, GHOULS, and DEMONS. But in 1969, a trio of Serling’s terrifying tales were combined in a made-for-television movie entitled Night Gallery. These spooky stories bore strong resemblance to the macabre plots of classic Twilight Zone episodes. The show was the evening’s highest-rated program, and its popularity prompted NBC to offer Serling a new series.
Rod Serling’s Night Gallery premiered in 1970 and remained on the air for two years. Serling, still weary from five years of clashing with network executives during the Twilight Zone run, served as the show’s host but had no real voice in making production decisions. He was thus frequently disappointed with the quality of the scripts and considered the series to be suspenseful and entertaining but totally lacking in artistic merit. Night Gallery did, however, make several attempts at delving into the great mysteries of life and death, most notably exploring the nature of hell.
From its debut, critics and viewers alike could not help but compare Night Gallery to its famous forerunner. The similarities were striking: Many of the new Night Gallery episodes were little more than revamped Twilight Zone scripts. Others were unique ideas depicting chilling situations and unsettling “otherworlds.” As Serling said of his former series, some were “real turkeys,” some great classics. The same was certainly true of Night Gallery.
“Escape Route,” a segment from Night Gallery’s pilot, was hauntingly reminiscent of an episode about damnation from The Twilight Zone entitled “Deaths-Head Revisited.” In both instances, the story line centers around a Nazi official who escapes conventional justice after slaughtering thousands of innocent Jews in the concentration camps. And for each character, hell consists of having to relive his vile atrocities from the victims’ perspective. These scripts rely on the DREAM MODEL of the afterlife, a theory that in the next world humans are either rewarded with memories of their virtuous lives or else tormented by recollections of their evil.
This theme recurs in several episodes about damnation. In “Lone Survivor,” a passing cruise ship picks up a lifeboat that seems to be carrying a shipwrecked woman. This survivor is, however, a man (played by John Cilicos) in female disguise. Cilicos remembers donning the dress and pushing other women and children aside as he deserted his post and fled the sinking Titanic. But the captain of the cruise ship says this cannot possibly be, since the Titanic sank three years ago, and no one could live adrift in a lifeboat for such a long time. The disoriented sailor is informed that the year is not 1912 but 1915, and he is now aboard the Lusitania. Before he can solve the mystery, the Lusitania is torpedoed by a German submarine and goes down. Cilicos is once again alone in a lifeboat, this time to be picked up by the Andrea Doria. He finally realizes that he has been damned to drift from one doomed boat to another as punishment for his cowardice and selfishness.
A differing interpretation of hell, titled “Pamela’s Voice,” aired in 1971. The episode features Phyllis Diller as a nagging wife whose shrill voice drives her husband, played by John Astin, to murder. After dispatching her, Astin gleefully celebrates with “wine, women, and song.” But her ghost soon appears with bad news: Astin’s excesses have brought about his own premature demise. Diller tells the horrified man that she has gone to heaven, where souls can spend eternity in any manner they wish. Being a “social being, an extrovert,” she has chosen to engage in her favorite activity—talking incessantly to her bored husband. Astin protests that he has no desire to spend eternity listening to her, but she happily exclaims, “The organization you’ve been assigned to is not so accommodating.” The defeated Astin wilts, resigned to his particular damnation, as Diller launches into an unending monologue on his inadequacies. Hell, according to the scenario, is a matter of perspective. “Pamela’s Voice” has definite overtones of WILLIAM BLAKE’s model of eternity, where heaven and hell are differentiated only by each individual’s outlook.
Astin returns to this philosophical view of the afterlife in “Hell’s Bells.” In this segment, he plays a hippie who dies in a car accident and is damned to a parlor populated by chatty yokels listening to monotonous elevator music. When Astin tells the DEVIL that this is unendurably boring, the DEMON replies that an identical room exists “up there,” and that what to him is torturous damnation is paradise to others. Before disappearing, the devil advises Astin to “think about it.”
The series presents another modern inferno in “Flip Side of SATAN,” in which a nasty disc jockey played by Arte Johnson learns that having the perfect job is not always a blessing. Serling opens the show by noting, “We refer to him by different names: LUCIFER, MEPHISTOPHELES, Beelzebub.” The episode then depicts Johnson as an adulterous con artist who swindles his friends and drives his lover to suicide without the slightest pang of conscience. All Johnson cares about is making a good impression as the new DJ on KAPH radio, but all the station’s records offer only disturbing funeral music. One, by the group the KARMAS, includes a booming voice inviting demons to partake of the “sacrifice,” which is in “the crucible from which there is no escape.” Terrified by the mysterious happenings, Johnson tries to flee but finds the door locked from the outside. When he tries to shut down the station’s electric power, the lascivious DJ is ignited into a burnt offering fit for Satan’s feast.
During its run, Night Gallery also brought a variety of classic hellish SHORT STORIES to the small screen. The finest of these is “Camera Obscura,” which depicts the realm of the damned as a mirror world where humans assume physical bodies to match the state of their souls. A heartless moneylender, obsessed with shaking down his destitute clients, accidentally stumbles into hell and discovers that he cannot escape. A throng of worm-infested, rotting corpses welcomes the condemned banker to his new, and eternal, home.
As the series slumped in the ratings, Serling was continually frustrated by the scripts the producers chose for Night Gallery. The one-hour show was eventually cut to thirty minutes, and writers dropped afterlife plots in favor of explorations into paranormal and psychic activity. Despite his grievances, Serling stayed with the series until it was canceled in 1972. Night Gallery marks his last contribution to original television projects, as the creative genius died of heart failure three years later at age fifty.
NIGHTMARE CAFE In the mid-1980s, horror director Wes Craven created a short-lived television series about meting out afterlife justice titled Nightmare Cafe. The supernatural diner of the title is a sort of LIMBO, a realm “between life and death” where souls can make a last stand in determining their fate. Robert Englund, famous for his role as a sadist straight from hell in the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies, was cast as the mediator who judges souls “somewhere between time and eternity.”
The show lasted fewer than a dozen episodes, and most involved the DREAM MODEL of final reckoning. This theory contends that after death, the soul is bound in never-ending memories of the deeds of its lifetime. Those who were kind and decent in life will enjoy reliving their days of virtue, whereas the evil will be trapped in an eternal recollection of vile acts and despicable crimes. For the characters in Nightmare Cafe, judgment in the afterlife amounts to being forced to face their failures and accept the dire consequences.
NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, A The phenomenally successful Nightmare on Elm Street series of films began with a simple premise: What would happen if the horrors of our nightmares suddenly came to life, complete with the ability to harm us physically? Filmmakers had explored this concept earlier in 1984 (the same year Nightmare was released) with Dreamscape, a convoluted sci-fi/political fantasy about experiments to invade people’s dreams as a means of manipulating—or even murdering—them. Dreamscape was a box office flop, but writer-director Wes Craven’s Nightmare spawned one of the most profitable horror films of the decade, perhaps because of the added element of raising dream villains from the depths of hell.
The original Nightmare on Elm Street—and its many sequels—features the afterlife exploits of child killer Freddy Kruger, played by Robert Englund. Burned alive by the parents of his victims, Englund returns to his neighborhood in the form of a dream invader who gives the surviving children horrible nightmares. When the young residents compare stories and realize they are all suffering the same bad dream, Englund steps up his plan and begins murdering them as they sleep. The teens must then find a way to convince the adults of Elm Street—who refuse to acknowledge their role in Englund’s murder—that he has returned and is planning to rid the street of all its children.
The dream sequences of the Nightmare films offer several grisly depictions of hell. One of the most horrible scenes shows souls trapped in Englund’s terribly scarred body. He opens his shirt to reveal dozens of shrieking faces lining his chest like open sores. Sneering, he informs one of his intended victims that these are his prisoners, damned to spend eternity with the vile creature. In the third movie of the series, Dream Warriors, a hapless teen is suspended over a bottomless pit that belches flames and foul smoke, a more traditional portrait of the underworld. And throughout the series, there are numerous depictions of the boiler room where Englund had been burned alive, with obvious parallels to the flaming pits of hell.
Despite being soundly trounced by critics (a British reviewer for Time Out commented that the film’s only appeal is “watching unpleasant American teenagers ripped to death”), the movie became a box office blockbuster. Fueled by this popularity, Craven’s concept generated a deluge of MOVIE MERCHANDISING, ranging from Halloween costumes to action figure dolls to book covers. Freddy Kruger soon became the host-villain of a series of COMIC BOOKS and a short-lived macabre anthology television series, Freddy’s Nightmares, in the tradition of the TWILIGHT ZONE. The vile fiend is even paid homage in the finale of another gory cinematic series, Friday the 13th. In the final installment entitled Jason Goes to Hell, Freddy Kruger’s trademark razor-fingered glove reaches out of the abyss to pull Jason into the underworld.
Englund himself parlayed his status as a horror icon into a role as the proprietor of NIGHTMARE CAFE, an otherworldly restaurant “somewhere between heaven and hell.” He has also reprised his portrayal of Freddy Kruger in the 1994 Wes Craven’s Final Nightmare. In this film within a film, the fictional fiend returns to terrorize the real-life actors (including Englund) who appeared in the original Elm Street movies.
NIGHTMARE ON THE 13TH FLOOR This 1990 made-for-cable film places the kingdom of SATAN on the thirteenth floor of a Gothic Victorian hotel. Debonair devil James Brolin allows travel writer Michele Greene a quick peek at the rituals and relics, yet when she reports having witnessed horrific crimes in room 1313, no one takes her seriously. A seemingly endless parade of the hotel’s owners, employees, and guests vehemently insist that there is no thirteenth floor and that she is either imagining things or deliberately lying to boost magazine sales. But persistent snoop Greene eventually discovers that the mysterious realm is home not only to a cult of DEVIL worshipers but also to a damned ax murderer. Hell, according to the producers, is a state of mind that can exist in any plane, even in the land of the living.
NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR Producers of the 1984 horror flop Night Train to Terror use the premise of a debate between God and SATAN to string together this disjointed series of supernatural stories. It is obvious to viewers that the anthology is simply a blend of footage shot for other unfinished films. However, the film poses interesting questions about modern criteria and attitudes regarding damnation, the nature of evil, and the possibility of divine mercy.
As the film opens, the two ancient adversaries sit in the dining car of Satan’s Cannonball arguing over which of the passengers’ souls will be delivered to hell when the train crashes at midnight. The setting then shifts to scenes about the people in question as a voice-over assures viewers that these heroes and villains really are on the train, even though we see them only in flashbacks at other settings. Richard Moll appears in two (as two different characters), being damned in both incarnations. Other glimpses into these ill-fated travelers’ lives include footage of sadomasochistic torture, portrayals of the Nazi concentration camps, and graphic depictions of exploding heads. Between these episodes, the narrator insinuates that the most horrible agony on earth is preferable to what awaits beyond “the gates of hell.”
The final entry in this muddled anthology offers a firsthand look at the infernal kingdom. Claire Hanson plays a doctor who is haunted by visions of hell and sees vicious DEMONS outside her window. Her terror mounts as a mysterious stranger declares that her husband is “on his way to hell,” followed by an anonymous letter stating, “Out of the pits of hell, Satan has come for you!” When Hanson goes to the basement to investigate disturbing noises, the floor opens up to reveal the ghastly and repulsive underworld. Demons and mangled bodies of the damned reach up from the fiery orange pit to pull her into the abyss as the shrieks of tortured souls boom forth. She escapes but is given a frightening task: She must extract “the heart of Satan,” or else an unspeakable evil will overtake the world.
Like the other segments, this plot goes nowhere, fizzling out completely as Satan escapes unharmed to continue his wicked schemes. The film concludes as the train crashes in a thunderous explosion. Before the unseen passengers perish, God tells Satan that the rich, powerful, and self-important will always belong to hell. But, he reminds the fiend, the poor, the weak, and children will forever be heaven-bound. In a final testament to the bizarre nature of this film, the end credits list Lu Sifer (a play on the name LUCIFER) in the role of Satan, while God appears “as Himself.”
NISE-E Nise-e, “likeness paintings,” are illustrations popularized during the Kamakura period (twelfth century) in Japan. Many of these scrolls were inspired by stories of the dark underworld and show the horrors of BUDDHIST HELL and its vicious DEMONS, including YAMA and EMMA-O. A typical infernal nise-e shows the damned suffering a variety of grisly tortures such as being beaten with clubs, raked over hot coals, or chased by ghastly beasts. Text describing the scene usually accompanied the hand scrolls, offering details about the picture. Many nise-e survive in Asian temples and provide examples of CHURCH ART AND ARCHITECTURE of the underworld.
NO EXIT French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre offers a distinctly modern interpretation of hell in his 1946 drama No Exit. The one-act play depicts the underworld as a shabby hotel where sinners spend eternity trapped with quarrelsome roommates, unresponsive valets, and constant violent eruptions. But the worst of the suffering comes from having to endure their own individual guilt.
The play opens as three characters assigned to the same room begin to protest their damnation. All assert that there must be some mistake: They don’t believe they have done anything so bad in life as to merit damnation. But as they compare stories, the truth comes out. Inez, a meddling gossip, admits that she “can’t get on without making people suffer.” The adulterous Estelle coldly explains that she became pregnant by her lover, then killed the baby girl despite the father’s pleas to let him raise the child. Upon hearing of his daughter’s death, Estelle’s lover commits suicide over his grief. And army deserter Garcin describes how he treated his devoted wife “abominably,” cheating on her constantly and ridiculing her for pure spite.
As the play continues, the three argue continuously and take turns verbally attacking one another. They fight over who should sit on which couch, if they should stay silent or talk, whose fault it is that the valet never answers the call bell. At last, Garcin declares, “Anything would be better than this agony of mind.”
There are no torture chambers or flaming pits in Sartre’s play: Hell in his drama is in being condemned to an eternity of pettiness, self-righteousness, and loathing. Quite simply, he contends that “hell is other people,” especially ones as miserable and vile as his pathetic trio.
NOMOU Micronesian belief describes Nomou, a fearsome monster who devours souls of the dead before they can reach Falraman (paradise). The dark god Lug catches human spirits during the full moon and feeds them to the beast.
NYIA Slavic myth features an underworld ruler called Nyia, dubbed the Polish Pluto. He is the overlord of the navs, spirits of people who die prematurely, especially virgins and victims of tragedy. These souls are thought to be jealous of the living and can return to haunt those who have had full, rich lives of diverse experiences. In the underworld, the navs suffer the aching for all the adventures and sensations they did not have the chance to enjoy during life. Nyia does not torture or punish the navs; he merely watches over them.
Many Slavs worry that the unhappy dead come back as VAMPIRES. Some burn the dead to protect themselves; others impale them on alder wood.