Mad God: How to Make Hell Scary Again
When you think of hell, what images come to mind? For most, I’d assume the answer would include fiery pits, winged devils, and the occasional river of damned souls (personally, I think of South Park’s Satan, singing and dancing in a tutu). These depictions are by far the most widespread throughout film and media today. But as visually freighting as they may be, we can only see so many pitchfork-wielding demons before they begin to bore us. Lightly put, hell just isn’t that scary anymore.
This was the convention that legendary animator and director Phil Teppet – whose animation feats include Star Wars’s AT-ATs and Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs – sought to break in 2021 with his stop-motion horror Mad God.
In the best way possible, Mad God is hard to watch. The 83-minute journey takes us through a desolate, industrial hell where suffering lies around every corner. Following our mute, hazmat-clad protagonist known only as “The Assassin", we visit madhouse hospitals, pass fields of endless war, and watch mad scientists conduct sadistic experiments. Constantly proving wrong that “at least it can't get any worse,” the film never allows viewers a single moment of peace. In fact, only after the screen faded to black and the credits rolled did I realize that I’d spent the entire runtime recoiled in my chair. So, you may ask, just what makes this vision of hell so effective?
One could certainly point to the pure grotesqueness of the film as the source of its horror. Undoubtedly, Teppet’s masterfully crafted puppets are scary in their own right. Yet, the film relies on much more than simple shock value to make its hell so horrible.
Contrary to what can be seen in most traditional portrayals of hell, the relationship between torturer and subject in Mad God is no simple dichotomy. Instead, each creature in this world delivers pain to those less powerful than it, creating a seemingly endless hierarchy in which no one is at the top or bottom. Giants squirm on endless rows of electric chairs, their kicks pumping machines which waterboard a one-eyed beast, in turn sparking fires to torch tiny dust creatures, and so on and so on. The chain of suffering in this world is never-ending.
Teppet has said that his goal with the film, if anything, was to make a “modern version of the Hieronymus Bosch" painting – and the resemblance is clear. In The Garden of Earthly Delights, one of many Bosh works to depict hell, strange and almost eldritchly silly scenes of torture stretch infinitely into the background and foreground. A man is strung up on a harp, a giant ear is pierced with arrows; one could easily get lost for hours staring at these countless layers of detail, like some sort of fucked-up Where’s Waldo? page. I myself almost bought a Bosh print for my wall, but I figured my roommate might not be too pleased.
The seemingly boundless worlds of Mad God and Bosh evoke a sense of utter dread in their viewers. If you were to zoom in or out on these worlds for an endless amount of time, you would never see an end. And it is this idea that reveals these hells’ source of true horror: the infinite. Demons and fire, while scary, are at least comprehensible. The infinite however, is a concept which our minds cannot even begin to understand. We cannot imagine what it would be like to be anywhere, let alone in hell, forever.
While many good horror films exploit our fear of the unknown (the reason why a monster is usually only revealed in full during a movie’s final few scenes), Mad God preys on our fear of the unknowable. Teppet forgoes the cliché depictions of hell found all too often in today’s media, and gives viewers something that is not only more interesting, but also much more frightening. Ultimately, Mad God uses the incomprehensibly terrifying idea of infinity to craft one of the most Lovecraftian, hopeless hells ever put on the big screen.
