I recently finished watching Hellbound S01. It was an interesting show and led me to look up a short animation that the director created back in 2003 titled "The Hell - Two Kinds Of Life" (지옥 - 두개의 삶).
In this short animation feature in 2 parts, creator Yeon Sang-ho (연상호) first sets up the ideas that would define his Netflix version almost 20 years later: the motif of a supernatural messenger who announces your death, followed by roving ghouls that later come to fulfill it.
It's especially interesting to compare the tone, themes, and plot points between the two creations that share the same name and same universe, both "The Hell" from 2003 and Hellbound from 2021, both of which are just called "Hell" in Korean.
Background on viewing the short
Tonight I sat and watched the 2003 animation and since there's been a huge amount of articles coming out in English about the Netflix version but not much online about this older animated version, I thought I would go over some of the key plot points with a screenshot summary and add a little bit of my own commentary to the scenes.
I would encourage you to watch it for yourselves, but as far as I could find online, only Part 1 is presented with English subtitles. So hopefully this plot summary will give you an idea of where the writer overlapped, and where he left some ideas and material behind. This part is interesting to me because I actually think the animated version, despite being much shorter, includes a lot of great dialog, scenes, and material that so far haven't materialized in the Netflix version.
The short is told in 2 parts, which complement and juxtapose each other. Both involve a character receiving the decree from the angel, but what that decree is and how each reacts to it both differ and are similar in important ways. I think it was an interesting choice to see these "two kinds of life" like this and see where they ultimately are the same or different.
So follow along with my plot summary and commentary.
The Hell - Two Kinds of LifePart 1
Part 1 is just 10 minutes, and begins with a shot of the main character eating a live rat in the sewer, and freeze frames into one of those "You're probably wondering how I got here..." type tropes, before starting the flashback that is basically this entire chapter.
We're introduced to the main character, who is just an everyman. Nothing special about him. No real drive or ambition, no major faults, just a common salaryman.
Pretty much the only thing he does do, besides smoke and drink too many sweetened coffees, is stare at the calendar in his room. A metaphor for how he spends the days of his life listlessly and uselessly, maybe. The calendar has a unique image of some kind of angel statue on it.
The protagonist is pretty invisible at work, never trying too hard to be social, and his boss is a typical asshole who yells at and demeans him constantly, likely simply because he's higher on the food chain. The protagonist, like any good Korean worker, takes the abuse with his head bowed down.
One of these typical nights, an angel appears to the main character in his room. I found myself wondering if this might not be a dream or hallucination from staring at his calendar too much lost in thoughts.
The angel announces that he is destined to Hell. Unlike the Hellbound Netflix series, this angel explains to him that there are various levels of Hell, and based on an examination of his life, he is placed in a certain ranking which means he will be assigned to a level of Hell where he will eternally feel a pain 10 times worse than his life's worst pain.
His worst pain in his life was when he was hit by a car when younger. He spent a long time in the hospital recovering, with every minor movement hurting. But the worst pain was the boredom of sitting there in the hospital bed doing nothing. I think this was meant to show a similarity to his current life, where he mostly spends his time sitting, smoking, watching the days go by. So we are left wondering if Hell is really just a more extreme version of real life for a lot of lowly office workers.
He frets and panics about this revelation, wondering what it means and why it would come to him.
He decides that as long as he keeps moving, death can't touch him, and he tries to run away, figuring if he can hide and stay a step ahead of whatever demons or whatever will come, maybe he can survive. This really seems like his most decisive action in his life yet, and the most active we've seen him. Maybe it took an omen from the underworld to finally motivate him to take action in his life, though it's surely too little too late now. Still, he will try.
But he's no runner, and gets worn out quickly, and hears crying nearby. It's his boss! Turns out the boss too received a revelation, and they both will be sent to Hell at similar times. The boss, wracked with guilt and fear, apologizes for all the terrible things he has put the protagonist through.
The main character notices they are sat by a fountain. Yup, it's the fountain in his calendar! I'll leave the meaning of this up to you. Could he simply be drunk or dreaming? Is this destiny? A reminder of time's passing? A symbol of how he never noticed what was right there around him? Or just a strange coincidence considering he bought the calendar at a local shop and maybe that shop owner just liked this local fountain and added it to the calendar. Whatever the meaning may be, it seems like running away from a calendar of slipping days is a hopeless endeavor.
He and his boss decided to wait out the short minutes left in their lives together back at his place.
Right on time, the demons arrive. I found these demons to be a lot scarier and more interesting than those in the Netflix series. More sinister, more human-like, more sadistic. The Netflix demons look like mindless apes doing a supernatural duty. These psychos seem like they enjoy their work. They are eager and excited to torment and torture. We can imagine they're not that dissimilar from the way the Korean boss acted, or perhaps how society treats some of us.
The boss was a worse guy than the protagonist, and his Hell ranking is lower than the protagonist, so he's in store for a world more of hurt. The demons begin brutally torturing him while he's still alive. They peel the flesh from his body slice by slice and even remove his face while he screams in agony. He finally dies and presumably goes into hell. The demons gleefully announce that it's his turn now.
The main character is beaten in accordance with his sin level before going to Hell. But then...
A curveball appears which wasn't in the Netflix series. The angel reappears and makes him a deal. If he wishes, he can escape this torment right now, but it means the demons will continue chasing him, and if they catch him, he may end up in an even deeper, more terrible level of hell. Is it worth the risk? He thinks it is.
I wondered about the metaphor behind this choice. To me, it made me think of those who take the daily beating in a dead-end job, who get the chance to risk it all on an independent pursuit. Opening their own business, moving out to the countryside to farm, moving abroad to work. The chance to escape the brutal rat race of "Hell Chosun" is a tempting one, but of course the penalty for failure there is just a whole new level of Hell: an empty savings account, the shame of returning home, the stigma of failure, the humility of starting from the bottom again. Is it worth it? Is the current and certain small hell worse than the chance of constant struggle to survive with the fear of a bigger loss looming?
For him, it seems to be.
He wakes up in the sewer, and we're back to the opening scene.
But he doesn't have long to relax. The demons are already on their way, and presumably will never give up. His life was hopeless and the days passed quietly away before, and now his life will be fast paced, active, and terrifying with horrors right at his feet.
Is he better off like this? Is this "surviving"? Add to this the constant nightmares of what happened to his boss (another metaphor for failure or for soul-selling?), and it sure seems like he's already in hell trying to avoid hell. The need to constantly run, constantly fear being caught by a worse fate than you're already in, and realizing that no matter how hard or fast you run, you're never really progressing, just treading water. Could hell be much different than this?
That concludes Part 1.
The Hell - Two Kinds of LifePart 2
Part 2 is around 20 minutes long, and is not directly connected to Part 1.
Part 2 features a young woman, very similar to the young man from Part 1. Disillusioned and unsure of the future, she stands as an everywoman.
I found this chapter to be immediately more interesting in the characterization of the young woman. Whereas the man from Part 1 seemed mostly listless, he seemed to at least, let's call it having his shit together. The young woman from Part 2 seems faced with a deeper type of existential crisis, and I got the impression the added pressures of being a woman in this society contributed to a more generally mentally unstable character. She is no K-pop star or 김치녀, but a rich and full character struggling both internally and externally.
The angel appears, but this time gives a revelation that will be shocking to Netflix viewers. This time, the angel prophecies her death and her being sent... to Heaven. The delivery is in the same lifeless matter-of-fact way as the delivery of news of Hell. It seems like the universe is passionless about the afterlife. This is another quirk that I liked more than the sinister messenger face that announces the revelations in the Netflix version.
The same ranking system applies, and somehow the girl has achieved level 1 ranking, and therefore will be sent to Heaven when she dies in a matter of days.
But what is Heaven? Rather than being thrilled by this news, the main character begins to slowly sink into an introspective, philosophical mood. She looks back through her life and her relationships, wondering what good she must have done to deserve this. And the idea that her death is now foretold weighs heavily on her. Is this good news? That she will surely die soon, and leave behind all she has known and loved, for an uncertain "heaven"?
She reconnects with her mom. We get the feeling she, like many young people today, moved out soon after college and tried making it on her own, and wasn't always the best daughter about staying in touch.
The Mom is of course worried about her daughter's death but appears thrilled by the idea that she has a guaranteed ticket to Heaven. Mom struggles to understand why her daughter is hesitating about this and not appreciating the news. Life has been so hard, for both of them, what better reward could there be?
But the main character becomes tormented with the idea of her impending death. What is the point of Heaven? How could it be a happier place than this world, when everything and everyone she loves is right here? Being forced to leave all that behind... is that something to be happy about? To spend eternity in some kind of illogical paradise of boredom without a choice in the matter? Is the afterlife really any better or worse than this life, where at least we have some agency and some ability to choose whether we will conform or not?
She meets with her boyfriend and seems to want to an amicable break up, explaining her situation. All of this comes suddenly to him, and he is shocked and expresses anger towards her. We get the feeling his anger is covering for a lack of agency here, and at the manner in which she seems to be dealing with this. This is too much for him to deal with and he violently storms out.
After some heart to heart, and some time to cool down, he urges her to not give up so easily and take this lying down. Let's fight this together. Let's run. Run away. He suggests he will be by her side and they'll stay on the run if necessary. But this idea, that he would involve himself in fighting "Heaven's" decree and possibly risking himself getting sent to Hell for it, plus all the other tumultuous thoughts inside her, is too much. He's yet again telling her what to do with her life, and she angrily slaps him and insists he take back the terrible words of this terrible idea.
If her reaction seems a little strange, we learn that she seems to both love and despise this boyfriend. She was previously already at a point where she had basically decided to give up on life (I'm not sure if she was implying suicidal thoughts or not, but it seemed like it to me), and it was him who "pressured" her into stay living, keep going. It's a weird and tragic feeling. It seems like her life is just a series of going through the motions, and she actually feels a chip on her shoulder towards the man who basically ordered her around.
A lot of her struggles here stem from a lack of agency. Her relationships, with her boyfriend and mother, are very problematic. All these people who supposedly seem to care for her and have her best interests in mind are just consistently ordering her and making demands of her, without regard for what she really wants and really feels. We can imagine this extends to societal expectation of her overall. She has inside a deep desire to buck these expectations and yet is continually surrounded by them, and worst of all, we might actually agree with some of the advice her mother, her boyfriend, society, is telling to her.
All of these thoughts continue to weigh more and more on her and she begins to feel that maybe trying to run away from this really would be the best choice. She's already run from her mother, her boyfriend, and herself, in some way. Her whole life has been on the run. Maybe her life, and maybe all our lives, are meant to be on the run anyway.
She meets her mother again, and although the experience begins warmly, it quickly devolves into an argument when the character reveals that she is thinking of running from the decree. Mom cannot understand why her daughter has to be this way, why she wants to drive a stake through her own mother's heart by avoiding Heaven.
One of the best lines here is how the Mom accuses the daughter of having been trying to "run from demons" her entire life rather than confronting them, and how has that worked out so far? This makes the connection pretty clear between the supernatural demons that will drag her to heaven and the various mental illness or social pressure "demons" that she's tried to buck her entire life, who are now going to try to force her into some idealized heavenly role.
They part after a heated argument where both say a lot of things they won't be able to take back, and the daughter storms out.
After some thinking, the daughter comes to the realization that she was too harsh to the woman who sacrificed so much of herself for her. Why is she always pushing people away? She needs to apologize to Mom before time runs out and she's "dragged" to Heaven.
But the next day when she arrives at Mom's place, the police are there. The mom has committed suicide.
The officer makes an unsavory comment about how people who commit suicide go to Hell, what a shame. The Mom left a suicide note that addresses the daughter. In it, the Mom states that she always has had nothing but love for her daughter, and that she knows the daughter will do whatever she wants (run or not run) and that, actually, Mom understands why the daughter wants to run away, but Mom could never say this in real life, fearful of it causing worry to the daughter.
I assume this is referring maybe to the pain of a daughter hearing her Mom tell her "yeah you should run away and never come back" or else referring to the daughter being alone and worried about her Mom probably in the same way the Mom has been worrying about the daughter all this time.
But the note ends with the Mom giving her the real advice she knew deep down she wanted to tell her daughter but simply couldn't: RUN.
This scene left me wondering about the Mom's intention. I can understand her motivation, if her only daughter is abandoning Heaven along with all the other expectations of a young woman she has already basically abandoned. There's nothing left in her daughter's messy life, and Mom will become just a burden anyway. Or perhaps the Mom could believe that running from Heaven's decrees is a one way ticket to Hell and Mom would rather be in Hell waiting for her daughter there?
I think there's also the idea that the daughter has led an unconventional life (for a female) and that the Mom could not openly support her daughter's difficult choices to avoid the trappings of normal traditional womanhood, but that deep down Mom, perhaps from her own hard experiences, really did want and support her daughter taking a different path. Maybe a different path from the one she herself took, which on the one hand gave her this daughter but on the other seems to have left her a single mom in a cruel world. So of course, in this life, RUN AWAY is the best option.
A lot to think about or debate here.
After this trauma, feeling there is nothing left, the main character decides to run. RUN. RUN. And each time she says this to herself, there is a strange shot of these legions of angels spastically flapping their boney wings.
I wondered a lot about the meaning of this scene. Does it suggest the futility of running away from fate, with legions of these creatures waiting to decree fate to humans? Maybe it shows that these carbon copies of female-looking angels are stuck in the same routines and expectations that human women are. Maybe to be a woman on earth or to be an angel in heaven are both suboptimal existences.
The main character decides to undo the damage with her boyfriend, and take him up on his original offer of running away together. We see him sitting depressed and lonely on his sofa, his own private little hell, when someone appears at the door. We don't immediately see who it is.
It wasn't the main character, who arrives later to find the door ajar, the TV on, but nobody there watching. She cautiously and suspensefully makes her way to the closed bedroom door and opens it to find...
Her boyfriend on top of another girl, doing the dirty. In what has got to be the nastiest comments ever, the shocked boyfriend mutters out "Uh... aren't... aren't you supposed to be dead by now?"
With nothing left to lose, the main character stares and ponders this for a moment, grabs a pair of scissors, and brutally murders the couple in the bed. Then waits the few moments until her fate arrives.
And at the predetermined time, just minutes after this, the angel appears once more, and informs her that, due to these acts, she has lowered her ranking on the sin chart. She's now assigned to Hell. The black demons rush in and...
And Part 2 ends.
Watch on YouTube
I was able to find both of these on YouTube, so it's very convenient to watch them.
Be aware that the link for Part 1 includes English subtitles burned into the video, while Part 2 does not have any subtitles. I did randomly find Part 2 available with German subtitles, so check yourself and you might get lucky.
Anyway here are the links that worked for me:
Part 1
Part 2
Commentary
I really enjoyed this animation. It doesn't have a lot of the mystery, intrigue, and conspiracy that the Netflix version has. But it feels more visceral and somehow more real. A lot more personal and brutal. More philosophically direct about things that were often kind of implied or simplified in the Netflix series.
I enjoyed these characters' reactions to learning about their deaths more. In the series, the cult leader deals with his impending 20-year doom by creating a cult and an artificial meaning behind his curse. Even those elements who disagree with his message and find the events random seem intent on pointing that fact out to the world. But here, the characters deal with it much more personally and struggle but find no real meaning whatsoever, artificial or natural, in what is happening.
Overall, the animation seems to bring a lot more existential questions directly the foreground, whereas the Netflix series left a lot of plot questions. I ended the Netflix series wondering mechanical questions, like:
- How do the demons work?
- How do the decrees work?
- Where was the single mother when she disappeared and resurrected?
But in this animation, the questions were more about the meaning of life.
- How much agency do we have in our roles in society?
- How much of our life can be blamed on circumstance and environment?
- How much can be blamed on our own action/inaction?
- Do our actions determine our punishments in the afterlife, or in this life, or neither?
- How much of heaven and hell are right here in our lives right now?
It seemed that for both of the characters featured in the animation, living life was already a living hell.
Before receiving their decrees, they struggled with depression, hopelessness, lack of meaning, a desire to be dead. After them, whether that decree is to hell or to heaven, it didn't really matter. Getting to be dead soon, they still struggled with the same feelings, the same hopelessness and lack of meaning. Is there any escape from these existential issues? It seems like there's not.
So I was left wondering about the value of running. Is it worth trying to run? Run from our responsibilities, or run from the directions we are meant to go? Will society's rules and expectations follow us anywhere? Can we outrun our own truths? Is there value in trying even if it's a hopeless case?
There's also the idea of the ranking system. I'm sure any Korean student or worker will shudder at the idea that even in the afterlife, a codified ranking system exists and your "success" in the afterlife depends on your positioning in that ranking.
Questions for Hellbound: Season 2
Now being able to compare this original animation to the Netflix series, it leads to a lot of interesting questions that might give some hints about what to expect in Season 2.
- We know that Park Jeong-ja has resurrected. Is it possible that through her own actions in the afterlife or the actions of someone on earth, her afterlife-ranking rose? Part 2 of this animation made it pretty clear that the decrees of the angels are not unfixable. The subsequent acts of the main female character altered her destination. We can wonder if something similar happened to Park Jeongja too. We also know from the series that the baby survived despite having his hell-bound trip prophecy too.
- Will the concept of being doomed to not just Hell but even Heaven show up in Season 2?
- Is it possible that deals can be struck with the angel, as the young man did in Part 1? Did Park Jeong-ja make such a deal?
It will be interesting to see how much of this original material will make its way into the writing of Season 2.
Hellbound webtoon
Some fans of the Netflix series are already aware that this current version of Hellbound is maybe more closely related to a webtoon Yeon created in 2019 which expanded on the the concepts of the animation. I have not read it so I can't comment on how similar or dissimilar it is to the Netflix series.
In fact Naver Webtoon has made it available in English and a few other languages which you can read here:
Final thoughts
Overall the show was interesting, and I think watching it heightened the experience of the animation for me. I was also a big fan of Train to Busan, and am excited to see what more installments we get from the wider "Yeoniverse."
And at the risk of ruffling some reader feathers, I have to admit that my favorite part of the Netflix special was this guy:
Arrowhead! Arrowhead! ARROWHEAD!
Comments