Visions of Hell: From Mel Gibson's upcoming, The Resurrection of the Christ, to The Unwritten

Wishing you all a pleasant Labor Day holiday! I hope you had a great weekend.

So, Mel Gibson told Joe Rogan he's going to make a movie sequel to The Passion of the Christ, from twenty years ago, The Resurrection of The Christ (teaser). He's using the same actor Jim Caviezel that played Jesus in the original, using film FX techniques to make him days older not decades older because, Gibson says, "You have to use the same guy."

Angels, Hell, the death of the last Apostle, it's got it all. It's a mad attempt, but like Mel says, "You've gotta take a swing."

Watch "Mel Gibson Talks "Passion of the Christ" Sequel on Joe Rogan" on YouTube

I’ve liked Mel Gibson and his films ever since I first saw The Road Warrior at the PAC while I was at Western Washington University. My girlfriend and I lived just below campus on Garden Street, and that night we walked up to see it. The place was packed, the crowd loud and rowdy, cheering and shouting at all the right moments—it was the perfect way to experience that film. Years later I found out that my future wife—the woman who would become the mother of my first child, and later my ex-wife—was working that very night as part of the theater crew, letting people in at the doors.

I wasn’t thrilled years later by his drunken, jackass comments that went viral, and I was surprised to learn more about his ideological and religious leanings. 

But I’ve always tried to separate an artist from their art. If we didn’t, there would be very little art left to enjoy. For truly vile people, we can withhold support while they’re alive—but once they’re gone, it becomes a different situation.

I learned this young. In the 1960s, my grandmother showed me just how much she disliked Charlie Chaplin. I loved him. She told me he had abandoned America, taken his money, and stopped paying taxes—a deep betrayal for someone who had lived through the Depression. Only later did I learn the truth: Chaplin had been unfairly hounded and politically driven out. If she had known that, I think she would have seen him differently.

So I try to temper judgment of artists’ lives versus their work. Too many have ruined themselves for us—Bill Cosby, who was once larger than life in America, or Woody Allen, whose filmmaking I studied in college. The list could go on.

The point is this: art can move us, shape us, and even save us. But the people who make it are flawed human beings. Sometimes their failures poison their work. Sometimes the work still stands apart. The challenge is how we hold onto the beauty they created without excusing the harm they did.

Back to Gibson, I found his talking about how he will be putting "Hell", "Sheol" (in Hebrew tradition, the underworld, the realm of the dead), on camera. It was using the word "Sheol" I found interesting when he mentioned it on The Joe Rogan Show because when I wrote "Anthology of Evil II Vol. II The Unwritten", I researched Hell.

I had a character that began there and escaped, so I fought myself over "showing" Hell in a book. So many have tried in books, stage and film and failed. But I take on these kinds of challenges and I went for it. 

I decided to take a different tact then ever I'd seen before. Clive Barker's version, (Hellraiser, The Hellbound Heart) gave us one of the most visceral and imaginative “hells” in modern horror, with the Cenobites’ realm of endless sensation and torment.

Others who took a shot at Hell.

📚 In Literature

• Dante Alighieri – Inferno (14th c.) The archetypal literary Hell — nine circles of sin and punishment, each vividly detailed. Almost every later depiction of Hell owes something to Dante.
• John Milton – Paradise Lost (1667) Hell as both a place and a psychological state. His Satan isn’t just a villain but an anti-hero, giving Hell a dramatic, almost political texture.
• William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790s) Blake turns Hell into a place of energy and imagination, contrasted with Heaven’s order and repression.
• Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood (late 19th–early 20th c.) While not always literal Hell, their stories of forbidden dimensions and spiritual corruption feel hellish, paving the way for Lovecraft.
• H.P. Lovecraft Didn’t depict a Christian Hell, but his cosmic horrors often function as hell-realms — inescapable, sanity-breaking voids with ancient gods instead of devils.
• C.S. Lewis – The Great Divorce (1945) A moral fable where Hell is depicted as a dreary, joyless “gray town,” more about separation from God than fire and brimstone.
• William Peter Blatty – Legion (1983, sequel to The Exorcist) Contains striking imagery of damnation and demonic cruelty, expanded in the film adaptation (Exorcist III).

🎥 In Film

• Jacques Tourneur – Night of the Demon (1957) Not Hell itself, but a demon summoning that drags its victim into something close to damnation.
• William Friedkin – The Exorcist (1973) Glimpses of Hell through demonic possession, with Pazuzu as the gatekeeper.
• Ridley Scott – Legend (1985) Tim Curry’s Darkness rules a realm that is basically Hell, dripping with gothic excess.
• Clive Barker – Hellraiser series (1987 onward) As you said, one of the most distinctive visions: Hell as a place of flesh, desire, and eternal sadomasochistic torment.
• Event Horizon (1997) A sci-fi take where a spaceship folds space and accidentally opens a gateway into a Hell dimension — pure chaos and torture.
• Constantine (2005) Shows a blasted, fiery Los Angeles–style Hell crawling with demons, very much inspired by both Dante and comic-book imagination.
• What Dreams May Come (1998) Based on Richard Matheson’s novel, Hell is a dark, desolate mental landscape where souls are trapped by their own despair.

So anyway, I took a different tact than any of them. 

In The Unwritten, the story is built across three universes. Hell is one of them, but it is not the whole book. Hell is not a place you want to spend a lot of time in. We do not spend a third of the story takes place there, balanced by the two other realms that carry just as much weight. All three universes are needed for the story to stand.

My Hell is not the familiar fire and brimstone of tradition. It is a pocket universe of despair, crowded and unrelenting, where souls bleed away their life force into a cycle of torment that never ends. The rule is simple: once here, always here. At its center is a being I call “Darkness,” which feeds on the suffering of souls, turning pain into an economy of survival and exploitation.

The landscape mirrors this hostility: endless caverns, eternal tides, jagged soulfalls. Every step downward is both physical and psychological, a descent with no bottom.

In shaping this vision I drew on many traditions. Different cultures have imagined Hell in their own ways, each molded by history, fear, and belief. In The Unwritten, those echoes fuse together to form a Hell that reflects not only punishment but also the human condition itself.

Still, Hell is only part of the design. The other two universes provide contrast and balance, giving the book its full scope. Without all three, the story would collapse. Hell’s presence matters, but it is not the whole journey.

In The Unwritten, Hell is not a place of fire but a living system of torment. Among its most haunting features is a river of souls, flowing in an endless cycle, pressed so tightly together they seem to congeal into one another. Within that mass, fragments of history’s darkest figures drift, forming grotesque clusters — Pol Pot among them, alongside others who carried whole nations into slaughter.

From this current, beings emerge. Darkness is only one of many, each spawned from the friction of souls scraping against the jagged edges of their eternal path. These creatures feed on suffering, some rising from the river itself, others hovering close by, scavenging for whatever fragments of agony slip free.

I will not say more here. The river and its spawn are meant to be discovered within the book, where their weight is felt in the story itself. But know this — Hell in The Unwritten is not simply a setting. It is alive, predatory, and inexhaustible, and its presence shapes the story as profoundly as the other universes it stands beside.

Hell has always been a mirror of who we are, shaped by culture, belief, and the darkness people bring into the world. In The Unwritten, it takes form as a living system of despair, as necessary to the story as the other universes that hold it together. Just as artists and their creations can fall into shadow and... sometimes rise again, Hell itself is both warning and reflection. 

I have offered only glimpses here, while the rest waits within the book. As I continue to explore how stories of damnation and redemption resonate across art, I look forward to seeing what Mel Gibson produces in his film The Resurrection of the Christ.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of me. Oh, and ChatGPT