Fire and Brimstone Hell



"''"This is a place where eternally Fire is applied to the body Teeth are extruded & bones are ground And baked into cakes which are passed around."''"

- Squirrel Nut Zippers, "Hell"

A Fate Worse Than Death that in some stories happens after death, just as Fluffy Cloud Heaven is The Theme Park Version of Heaven, Fire And Brimstone Hell is the Theme Park version of Hell. Generally, if it isn't an Ironic Hell, the Bloody Bowels of Hell or A Hell of a Time, it's this. And even then, you can expect the odd brazier and stalactite.

Common features of a Fire and Brimstone Hell include underground cavern-like decor, plenty of Hellfire and lava, and red-skinned devils with horns and tails poking the souls of sinners around with their pitchforks. Sometimes, it's actually shown to be underground literally, but most of the time it's Another Dimension.

Note the curious discrepancy; despite rebelling against God, devils in hell are doing some kind of job with awe-inspiring diligence and consistency. This job arguably makes Hell someplace someone doesn't want to go; which theoretically helps God. Some theorize that Hell is thus part of God's plan and still under His employ; or else devils get something out of torturing souls. Mana, perhaps. Or maybe they're just sadistically amusing themselves. Another popular theory in fiction is that it was originally a prison, but Satan took it over; subverting its mechanics.

For information on how this trope came about, see the Analysis page.

Anime and Manga

 * The brief glimpse of Hell in Rurouni Kenshin is depicted as a boneyard with a rather creepy atmosphere.
 * Although Shishio's girlfriend Yumi is there with him, and looking yummy as ever. Having a woman like that would make Hell quite a bit more tolerable.
 * Besides that fact, Shishio also appreciates his new surroundings because without anyone like Kenshin there, he'll have no trouble conquering it!
 * In Bleach, a Soul Reaper's job is to redeem souls that have turned into Hollows, allowing them to pass on to the Soul Society...however, those who committed heinous crimes before dying are condemned to hell upon their defeat, implied to be of the fire and brimstone variety.

Comic Book

 * Neron and other comic book devils live in a Fire and Brimstone Hell, unless it's a Vertigo book.
 * The Vertigo Hell is more complex. Lucifer was accorded rulership over Hell which he accepted because it was the most distant place in Creation from the Creator. Demons and devils flocked there because Lucifer was the most powerful anti-God leader. The damned souls of mortals are all self-exiled - they impose their own punishments and compel Hell to torture them because they think they deserve it. (Of course, the demons eventually set up an economy based on these souls, which makes them anxious to collect more.)
 * The first time Hell appears in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, it's just like Earth but is filled with all the world's stupid, petty and shallow people, who all react in a ridiculously over the top manner to minor annoyances. Later, when Squee looks in the basement of Senor Diablo's earthly house, it's classic fire and brimstone.
 * The premise, of course, is that just being surrounded entirely by people who deserve to be in Hell is Hell itself. As Sartre said, "Hell is other people." Literally.
 * It is also implied to be Satan's punishment for rebelling against god—being forced to run the repository for human ingrates for the rest of all eternity. By the time Squee rolls around, this no longer seems to be the case, however.
 * The same premise is used in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, where Hell is merely a very dull city; everyone is entirely solipsistic, to the point of violently repulsing anyone who attempts to get in line for the bus in front, or even behind, them.
 * Sometimes, there are varying degrees: The first circle of Hell can be this, while the worse circles are all fire, brimstone and torture.
 * In Preacher (Comic Book) the Saint of Killers is so full of hatred, he causes Hell to quite literally freeze over.
 * Hell is initially shown to be this in the Spawn comics, but as the story progresses it turns out that this is only a tiny facet of the underword, the rest of it is much bigger & much weirder...
 * As revealed in his cartoon tracts, Jack Chick is very much a "grim, fiery underworld now, lake of fire later" man.
 * Marvel Comics Hell-Lords are demons that control their own dimensions. Most of those "pocket hells" are based on this version, especially Mephisto's. It's almost certainly done on purpose, because every single one of the Hell-Lords is trying to convince everybody that he is real Satan and his Hell is real Hell. Also when Hell-Lords and rulers of other kinds of afterlives (like Hades from Greek Mythology or Hela's domain from Norse Mythology) choose to combine them into some kind of "MMORPG Afterlife", something like that was created in between.
 * In the Disney comics Dante parody "Mickey's Inferno" (USA publication: Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 666; no kidding!), Hell is depicted this way, with oafish demons torturing sinners. There is the twist that if a damned soul does good deeds in Hell, he can redeem himself and ascend to Heaven; in one case, a good deed amounts to defending fellow inmates from the demons' torture.

Film

 * The film version of Constantine featured Hell (and Heaven) as parallel universe versions of the real world; when John Constantine visits Hell, it's a demon-infested, burned-out version of Los Angeles (insert biting topical humor here), while Heaven is downtown L.A. in the clouds (insert drug or smog joke here).
 * What Dreams May Come partially averts this by showing many visions of Hell, only one of which them of the Fire and Brimstone variety. Hell is shown as a surging sea, a beach of flaming shipwrecks (fitting the trope), a field of disembodied faces, and a parallel universe version of the damned's own house, set on the ceiling of an upside-down cathedral. Also, none of the torment of Hell depicted is physical, only mental.
 * The Hell of Drag Me to Hell, though not actually seen.
 * The Hell in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey is somewhat like this. Being floating islands chained the to the main devil himself. When the two go to talk to him, the devil traps them in steel like corridors with rooms based on their worst nightmares (i.e. a psycho Easter bunny, a very creepy grandma and a Drill Sergeant Nasty) making it akin to an Ironic Hell as well.
 * The Hell in The Black Hole is certainly this with
 * Averted in Clive Barker's Hellraiser and sequels. Hell is a place where the damned are tormented mainly with hooks on chains, spikes, and bladed instruments—or sometimes, like Frank in Hellraiser II, with the torment of Tantalus. Fire does not seem to feature. In Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, a priest tells Pinhead, "You'll burn in Hell!" Pinhead retorts, "Burn? What a limited imagination!"
 * Played straight in Hideaway, based on a Dean Koontz novel.
 * In Toy Story 3, a garbage incinerator serves as a quite fitting substitute.
 * Elements of this version of Hell can be seen in Big Tits Zombie.
 * Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame used a river of molten lead dumped out of the cathedral during the climax to represent Hell.
 * The 1970 Scrooge! musical with Albert Finney has a usually-cut-for-syndication scene of Ebenezer finishing his 'Yet To Come' sequence by being grasped by enormous chains and dragged down to this sort of Hell. Even though nowhere near as bad as some depictions, for a Christmas movie, even at what all know to be the scary part, it was a bit surprising to see.

Literature
"See! It is a pitiful sight. The little child is in this red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor of the oven. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in hell -- despair, desperate and horrible! ... God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God, in His mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood. Perhaps at this moment, seven o'clock in the evening, a child is just going into hell. To-morrow evening at seven o'clock, go and knock at the gates of hell, and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. Then they will come back again and say, the child is burning! Go in a week and asked what the child is doing; you will get the same answer -- it is burning! Go in a year and ask; the same answer comes -- it is burning! Go in a million of years and ask the same question; the answer is just the same -- it is burning! So, if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer -- it is burning in the fire!"
 * In spite of everything, Dante Alighieri's Inferno actually averted this trope for the most part. Naked flames do feature, but only in four of the twenty-four divisions of Dante's Hell and just one of the seven regions in his Purgatory. You are as likely to be boiled, drowned, chopped or frozen, as you are burnt, in Dante's Inferno. Furthermore, Satan, together with the worst damned of all, remains imprisoned in Hell's center - a glacial cavern.
 * Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel, also titled Inferno, that revisits Dante's hell with a few modern updates for 20th-century sins. The protagonist is a somewhat self-deprecating hack science fiction writer, and his guide is a longtime resident of Hell named.
 * Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series has a Hell that is like this in many places. It's revealed through later books that Hell has many regions, including a "mock Heaven" for souls that have been incorrectly sent to Hell and can't now be returned to Heaven.
 * Justified in James Branch Cabell's Jurgen in that the Hell the protagonist visits is based on his father's opinion of what Hell should be like.
 * The Hell of John Milton's Paradise Lost is more of a Fire and Brimstone Hell than Dante's--for instance, Satan is, in the opening, chained to a lake of brimstone. Everything in that land is constantly burning, although the fallen angels don't mind too much.
 * In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Stephen regains his religion after hearing a particularly frightening description of fire-and-brimstone hell from a preacher.
 * Aversion in Dean Koontz's Hideaway. Primary antagonist Vassago reflects on his time in Hell at one point, describing it as a cold, lightless place.
 * Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater has a version of Hell that's like this and literally The Theme Park Version: it's presented as a major interdimensional tourist attraction. Borgel says he doesn't really know what goes on inside, but says that he does know that if you didn't like it, you'll have a lot of trouble getting your money back.
 * Played with in  Faust Eric, where the Discworld version of Hell is a Fire and Brimstone Hell... but the inmates have realized that they no longer have corporeal bodies, and so there's nothing requiring them to feel pain any more. The new King of Hell has shaken things up by introducing mental rather than physical tortures, but the actual demons are just as upset about this as the "clients".
 * In a series of books for children (frequently quoted by atheists making emotional appeals), the nineteenth-century missionary priest John Furniss (pronounced "furnace"?) provided vivid word-pictures of Fire and Brimstone Hell:


 * Is it just me or does this guy seem to take *way* too much...uh...pleasure...in imagining these things??
 * In The Guardians, Hell is a huge realm with many areas. The traditional fire and brimstone area is The Pit, where the souls of damned humans and disobedient demons are tortured.

Live Action TV
"Neelix: 15 decks. Computers augmented with bio-neural circuitry. Top cruising speed: warp 9.975... not that you'll be going anywhere. B'Elanna: No Fek'lhr? No 'Cavern of Despair'? Neelix: Don't need them. B'Elanna: I don't consider Voyager hell! Neelix: Are you sure? Have you ever been truly happy here? If you thought fifty years aboard this ship would be difficult, try eternity!"
 * Averted in The Middleman, where it looks somewhat like an office building.
 * Star Trek: Voyager: In "Barge of the Dead" B'Elanna Torres finds herself on the barge taking dishonoured Klingon souls to hell (Gre'thor). Pulling up at the dock she sees the expected tall menacing gates, fiery skies, etc... only to find once she enters it's just like Voyager.


 * An eternity with Neelix? Perhaps the most terrifying Hell ever conceived.
 * Star Trek: The Original Series: in "The Cage" (with footage re-used in "The Menagerie"), the Talosians briefly inflict the illusion of Fire and Brimstone Hell on Captain Pike. Furthermore, if Pike does not behave, the Talosians threaten to go deeper still into his mind for experiences even worse!
 * Interestingly subverted in an episode of The Twilight Zone where a criminal dies and thinks he's gone to heaven because everything goes his way. But he eventually becomes sick of what he thinks is Heaven and wants "to go to that other place". This is when he is told that he is in "that other place". Final words of the episode: ...an angry little man, who now has everything he could ever ask for, and has to live with it forever.
 * The Hell in Married... with Children is shown like this.
 * Played straight and subverted in Supernatural. The first glimpse we get of Hell is through the Devil's Gate in the final episode of Season 2, and what we see is a rock passageway lit from below by what looks like fire or lava. Then, subverted in the last episode of Season 3, when we see  actually in Hell, which looks like a thunderstorm with metal chains and sharp hooks everywhere, with   himself in the middle of it. Finally, in Season 6, we see   remember Hell, and it is a completely straight Fire and Brimstone Hell.

Music

 * During the skits on MC Chris's albums, chris himself ends up sent to hell, and it's portrayed this way. In fact, literally everything is on fire, including the gloves required to pick up the variety of on-fire objects. The tortures are more mental than physical, with chris opting to gut himself with a fork to distract himself from some awful rapping his subjected to. It's also implied that his torture is to produce real versions of the deliberately bad songs he had refused to create in earlier skits.

Mythology

 * The ancient Egyptian depictions of the The Underworld, such as the Book of the Dead, feature what is probably the Ur Example of this: lakes of liquid flame, tended by fire-breathing goddesses and serpents, where the damned are burned. It's unclear whether they suffer forever or just get cremated to deny them an eternal afterlife.

Newspaper Comics

 * Many, many The Far Side cartoons.
 * In Frank and Ernest, once they bring out the paper in Hell, and check they covered all the Seven Deadly Sins.

Tabletop Games

 * A large section of Hell is just like this in The Lords. Although Satan Is Good and it's of a Self Inflicted variety...
 * Although there are a hell of a lot of levels, many levels of The Abyss and a number of the Nine Hells in Dungeons and Dragons are described like this. Some of the more traditional levels (such as frozen Cania) are there though as well.
 * The D20 setting Infernum is set entirely in this sort of Hell. Demons torment souls to extract a substance called "iliaster", which is food and drink to them, and it is not a pleasant place. It's not all fire and flames, though- in fact, as Hell technically consists of a whopping huge crater punched by the crashlanding of the Fallen Angels, fire and flames are actually a minority. Starting on the surface and going down the nine "Circles" of Hell, you have lifeless desert (Emptiness), icy mountains locked under perpetual thunderstorms (Tempest), swamps and mires and mudflats (Tears), volcanic badlands (Toil), war-scarred wastes (Slaughter), urbanized ruins (Industry), lush jungles sharing borders with a river of flame and a desert (Delight), a massive volcanic range (Malebolge) and an eternally shifting city (Pandemonium). And that's not getting into other notorious landmarks, like the river Cocytus, a river of unnaturally cold jet-black ice that emerges from beneath the volcanos of Malebolge and forms a barrier around Pandemonium... and the demons want to know just how that frickin' works too.
 * The standard D&D setting splits the difference, with some areas completely fulfilling this trope and others subverting the Hell out of it. On the balance, it's several separate dimesions, each with multiple subdimensions, that read like a somewhat tedious version of Dante's Inferno.
 * The game In Nomine is the hilarious Gold Standard of Tabletop Game Hell (and Heaven, for that matter), since Hell and its environs are a substantial fraction of the gameworld. However, only the domain of the Demon prince of Fire is actually filled with fire and brimstone. Some areas are merely tedious and others even manage to be amusing. While torture and suffering were part of how the evil demons powered their eceonomy, the setting then subverts itself by basically giving all the damned an easy way out: they can simply pony up their spiritual energy every morning and then stop the torture. The demons can't drag it out of them, so the only way they can get the dead humans to pay is to bribe or threaten them (which means they must be trustworthy over the long haul, or humans will stop powering all the things demons want).

Theme Park

 * Mister Toad's Wild Ride in Disneyland fits this trope to a T after a judge yells "GUILTY!" at the rider's face. Potentially Nightmare Fuel, especially when it gets really hot when you are in hell and Florida actually doesn't feel as hot as it is. The ride was since closed down and replaced with a Winnie the Pooh-themed ride.
 * And somewhere between, Mr. Toad is actually killed after being hit by a train while escaping prison.

Video Games

 * In Afterlife, you build the Fire And Brimstone Hell, with punishments based on the Seven Deadly Sins and with focus on "pun" (such as a punishment called "Another Man's Shoes"—guess where the damned are put in?).
 * The erebus maps in the Age of Mythology feature this kind of hell, although they are primarily based off of Greek myths.
 * Averted in Devil May Cry 3, where the Demon World is composed of "stray" bits of space, including an Escher-style stair labyrinth. Previously, in the first game, Hell is made of pulsing flesh.
 * Although, when you fight Mundus, the second half of the battle does in fact take place in a lake of fire.
 * In Devil May Cry 4, one boss introduces itself as "The conqueror of the Fire Hell." However, said location is never shown.
 * In Diablo II, a part of Hell is the River of Flame, which is classical fire and brimstone. Other parts of Hell include great, dark, ashen plains.
 * The first Diablo envisioned Hell as a land of bones, blood and mutilated corpses.
 * A couple of areas in the Netherworld in Disgaea are like this, such as the Sea of Gehenna, and the immediate area around Laharl's Castle (which itself hovers atop of a giant lake of lava). That being said, Disgaea's Netherworld generally has more variety than your average Hell, including anything from frozen wastelands to trippy starfields to inconspicuously cheerful-looking Ghibli Hills.
 * The Doom series of games (particularly Doom 3) feature just this kind of hell.
 * The planet Heck in the Earthworm Jim game, and the cartoon as well.
 * It's worth noting that Heck has a touch of Ironic Hell in it - as the soundtrack starts with Night on Bald Mountain...and then cuts off halfway through and is replaced with elevator Muzak (punctuated with anguished screams.)
 * While not Hell itself, The Elder Scrolls series has the Deadlands, Mehrunes Dagon's realm of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, greatly resemble this form of Hell. Other Daedric realms are much different, though. There's also a bit of subversion in that canonically, the Deadlands, despite their volcanic landscape, are extremely cold - in one quest when you're leading the Bruma Guard into an Oblivion Gate, the captain complains about how cold it is. And he's a Nord, which are naturally resistant to cold.
 * The torture area in Mankar Camoran's Paradise seems to also fit very well.
 * The final mission of Thief: The Dark Project, "The Maw of Chaos," is set in the Trickster's realm - underground, featuring a lot of lava rivers and monsters.
 * In Saga Frontier
 * Averted in Painkiller, where Purgatory is made up entirely of manmade creations, such as ruined cities, military bases, mines, opera theatres.... and the last level, which takes place in Hell proper, is a montage of the horrors of war, frozen in time. The add on Battle Out of Hell even has an orphanage.
 * Guild Wars' Ring of Fire. There's even a section called 'Hell's Precipice'. I doubt even Ol' Horney would argue. It does look like his kind of real estate.
 * Muramasa: The Demon Blade features this exact hell with damned soul wandering through the burning wasteland in the background.
 * One of the settings in the original Lemmings is this version of Hell, featuring fire blowers, lava, and a demonic exit door. The PSP remake maintains these features and throws in a couple of demon skeletons for good measure.
 * The Hell of Blazing Fires in Touhou Project's Subterranean Animism. Supposedly the whole of the Underground was once a district of Hell and, as of Touhou Project Hisoutensoku, Utsuho claims that restarting those Blazing Fires may have opened it back up. Special note, however, should be made that all references to "hell" in this series mean the Buddhist hells.
 * The Nether in Minecraft. The setting is underground, filled with lava lakes and almost everything else is made of a stone which perpetually burns if set on fire. The old development name for this dimension was even called "Hell", but Notch decided against a religious term. Zombie Pigmen and giant tentacled monsters named Ghasts roam this dimension.
 * Now in 1.0.0 there are Magma Cubes (Fiery slimes) and Blazes (Burning spirit like creatures)
 * Red Mountain in Sonic Adventure is like this, complete with ghostly prisoners and giant stone skulls that shoot fire, with some very large metal hammers and random religious symbols thrown in for good measure. Although it seems to represent the Lava Reef Zone volcano from Sonic And Knuckles, it doesn't look much like it.
 * , the final level of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, is supposed to be a stand-in for Hell.
 * At the conclusion of Soul Calibur 2, you enter the Soul Edge and confront its spirit, Inferno, in a massive burning, barren landscape. The stage is named "Tartarus", and the announcer all but states that you've entered Hell.
 * Dark Souls invokes this with the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, two demon infested lava levels.

Western Animation
"Squid Devil: You are raped by fire all day! And the days are longer down there. You know what we have to drink? Fire, motherstuffer, that's what! And dinner? That's a root, that makes you thirsty for more flippin' fire! It's ridiculous what I have set up down there!"
 * South Park bounced between this and not being so bad. It's just that Satan's an Affably Evil Punch Clock Villain who gets along with God (and he's gay.) He tortured people, but you get the feeling it's really his job. His boyfriend, Saddam Hussein, on the other hand...
 * Satan frequently hosts parties, too - even a Christmas celebration! Also, because this show's Fluffy Cloud Heaven is reserved only for Mormons, plenty of good people show up here. In fact, Heaven's actually extremely dull, crossing this Hell over with A Hell of a Time.
 * Once Saddam Hussein was even sent to Heaven because he didn't consider Hell much of a punishment. Eternity with a bunch of Mormons on the other hand...
 * Turned up in several Warner Bros. cartoons.
 * This is the Hell where the Warner Brothers and their sister end up in the Animaniacs episode "Hot, Bothered and Bedeviled." True to Warner form, they proceed to torment Satan until he can't stand it anymore, culminating in freezing Hell over, leading to him kicking them out of Hell and into Heaven instead.
 * Futurama has Robot Hell, which fits this trope to a T. Only with robots, obviously.
 * "Well done, android. The Enrichment Center once again reminds you that android hell is a real place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance."
 * Hell Heck in Rocko's Modern Life starts out as Fire and Brimstone Hell until Peaches removes the backdrop, saying that it's only for the tourists.
 * The Baskervilles was set in a literal theme park version of Hell.
 * Shows up in Teen Titans season four; Robin and Slade have to descend there to save Raven's soul  in the finale.
 * Shows up in Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
 * This is the type of Hell in Squidbillies:

"Devil: This is the fourth circle of Hell? Smeck: Hey, this is a tough course. Look at that fringe - I mean, you hit it in there and you're looking at a 10 for sure."
 * Miseryville on Jimmy Two-Shoes, albeit a somewhat tolerable version.
 * God, the Devil and Bob depicts Hell this way, although Satan has to keep an eye on it or people start slacking off. They once turned the entire fourth circle into a golf course when he wasn't looking.

"Adolf Wolf: Have I been blown to... A bunch of devils: Eh, it's a possibility."
 * In The Simpsons episode, "Bart Gets Hit By A Car," Bart appears to be ascending into Heaven, but after spitting over the rail (which he was told not to do), he gets sent to this version of Hell (though the Devil is purposefully depicted as scrawny). Bart gets sent back because it's not really his time, and he doesn't seem particularly concerned about avoiding this fate - shrugging off changing his ways.
 * Subverted in "Homer's Triple Bypass." After another heart attack, Homer wakes up to say, "Oh, Doctor, I was in the most wonderful place with fire and brimstone."
 * Shows up near the end of the unaired House of Mouse short "Minnie Takes Care of Pluto."
 * In the 1960s Adventures of Superboy episode "A Devil of a Time", Superboy spots a couple of crooks while wearing a Halloween devil costume. He pretends to be Lucifer come to grant them three wishes, and ultimately takes the crooks "home" with him to a volcanic crater in order to Scare'Em Straight.
 * "Curses! I've gone to Hell! How unfortunate!"
 * Surprisingly averted in Hercules, which did make Hades evil, but didn't turn the Underworld into this. It looks gloomy and cold, fitting in better with the original Greek underworld.
 * The open grave Scrooge McDuck-as-Ebenezer Scrooge gets thrown into during the "Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come" sequence at the end of Mickey's Christmas Carol is actually implied to be this depiction of Hell.
 * Appears briefly at the end of the Ren and Stimpy episode "Sven Hoek".
 * At the end of Tex Avery-directed MGM cartoon, Blitz Wolf, this is where Adolf Wolf winds up after getting killed.

Web Comics

 * Affirmed and subverted in Casey and Andy. Satan's realm Hell is a realm of sulfur, fire, and brimstone. But since she's in rebellion against God, she sees no reason to torture souls whose only crime is disobeying God. The only souls she tortures are those who have ticked her off personally. (Which includes Adolf Hitler, who just ticks a lot of people off for some reason.)
 * Averted in Dominic Deegan, where Hell is a rocky wasteland that makes everyone fight amongst themselves for superiority. The only torturing is done by the superior guys, under their own will. Occasionally, hellfire rains from the sky, which are more like comets, but that's about it.
 * Played almost straight in Remember and by extension Avatar Battle Royale, where Hell is almost identical in composition to aforementioned Dungeons & Dragons Hades, except Levistus rules in ABR.
 * Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal plays this on occasion, if it wants to (but is far more prone to Fluffy Cloud Heaven). One of the few times it was actually directly seen was 'Atheist Hell'. Which looked like this trope, but the torture was far worse: Poorly reasoned proof of Satan's existence, for all eternity.
 * Hell appears occasionally in Problem Sleuth, appearing almost exactly like this page's description. The major difference is that, because weapons randomly turn into other objects in the comic, the devils poke the souls of the damned with gay porn magazines.
 * Played with in Mind Mistress, wherin after Alvin's mind takes over one of the (currently deep, deep underground) Unstoppable Ones he assumes he's been confined to Fire and Brimstone Hell for his sins. The man who sent him there does nothing to abuse him of this notion.
 * Played straight in Slightly Damned for the most part. However, along with the fire and brimstone sections, there are also sections devoted to The Song That Never Ends and an area with nothing but rocks (boredom hell).
 * In Prickly City, a full-blown supporter of Kevin can be found by digging for it. The panel shows flames and a pitchfork, with actual speaker offstage.
 * Sinfest. Baby Blue and Fuschia keep the damned from rising out of the fires with their pitchforks. At least Baby Blue does, nowadays.
 * In Hell Lost" the Infernal Realm is inspired by both Dante and Milton. Ledges, instead of circles, step down and break out into the Frozen Continent. Macabre demons inspired by Bosch and Bruegel mix with more modern realizations, and the realm itself is riven by political rivalries and intrigue that leads to an inevitable but long awaited Counter Revolution.

Humour
"Paisley: And in this Hell of eternal damnation, there will be fire, and brimstone, and much screaming and gnashing of teeth! Toothless old geezer at the back of the church: Wo' abou' if ye haven' any teef lef'? Paisley: Teeth will be provided!"
 * A joke parodied the wording of this trope once, featuring Ulster Unionist politician and minister Reverend Ian Paisley, a man known for his obnoxious views towards Catholics, Nationalists, homosexuals and everyone else he doesn't like. In this joke, he is delivering a sermon describing a Hell much like this:

Religion

 * The conception of Hell as this is pretty much now obsolete. Nowadays, if you would ask a non-fundamentalist Christian, you are more likely to get a reference to "Eternal Separation" instead of fire and brimstone. What that means is an exercise left to the listener.

"Thank you for staying with us this here at Hell bar and grill resorts. For our entertaiment today, you have been selected for hot strip poker the red hot poker experience and hot peal, with complementary sulphur, acid and salt for your skin, scalp and face. Enjoy eternal punishment, because you deserve it."