The Theology of Netflix’s ‘Hellbound’ (‘지옥’): Season 1
© 2021 Netflix
Hellbound was an unsurprising hit in the wake of Squid Game (‘오징어 게임’) when it dropped, quietly, onto Netflix earlier this month and it had me hooked. I caught an advert for it and as it was only six hours, figured it would keep me occupied while I was doing my classwork for the week and waiting for my boiler to be delivered.
Oh, boy, was I hooked.
The series is set in an alternative future where ‘angels’ appear and random people to Hell in a set amount of time, from thirty seconds to twenty years. When the time elaspes, three ape-like ‘demons’ appear from nowhere to beat the living daylights out of the victim before siphoning their soul and vanishing, leaving a charred skeleton in their wake and plenty of shocked eyewitnesses.
Set in South Korea (I’m of the impression this is a local phenomena, not a global one), what begins as a police investigation turns into a drama focusing on the rise of a new religious movement/cult called the New Truth Society, as well as society’s reaction to people being dragged to hell.
Some initial notes:
I’m still converting South Korean won into £ and $. Also I watched this first dubbed and then subbed. Also I don’t speak Korean so I have no idea if the subs are good.
The ‘angels’ never identify themselves. They appear, suitably amorphous and with voices which take aspects of masculine and feminine tones, name a person and condemn them to hell after a set period of time. They never actually say ‘we’re angels’ and could easily be aliens for all we know. Having only seen them speak Korean, as there have been no decrees featured outside of the country within the aired episodes, we don’t know if they omnilinguistic.
The ‘demons’ appear, run in, zap the victim and then run out of our dimension, even if they are due to return a few minutes later. They don’t loiter and they also never speak or identify themselves as demons. They could be aliens for all we know.
Sin is an interesting concept. Again, the victims are told they’re going to hell but they are never called sinners or told they’re evil people. This becomes important during the second act of the series when we meet three day old Toughie.
Religion is HUGE in South Korea, with Christianity having a particular foothold. This is important for the series overall, even though it’s worth mentioning, loudly, that the New Truth Society is NOT a Christian sect. It is a new religious movement (NRM) and cult which develops its own doctrine and has two distinct forms and several phases of leadership and direction.
‘New religious movements’ (NRM) and ‘cults’ are not the same thing but the two are connected in this narrative. NRMs are small religious groups which appear over time, and many NRMs eventually become either religions or cults, depending on your perspective. When discussing cults, I refer to Dr. Steve Hassan’s BITE model as this delineates membership with a religious group to belonging to a group which uses its adherents and attempts to control them to an unhealthy degree.
Before we move on, here’s a trailer
The series is split into two micro-arcs with shifting protagonists and a five year time jump between them. The first few episodes follow a policeman, Jin Kyeong-hoon, and ‘Chairman’ Jeong Jin-soo, a lawyer named Min Hye-jin whose mother has cancer and Park Jeong-ja, a mother who has been sentencedl and just wants to protect her children.
The second arc, set in 2027, focuses on Bae Young-jae, his wife Song So-hyun and their newly born baby, Toughie, who is sentenced to Hell. Oh and there’s the streamer Lee Dong-wook who crosses both arcs and mixes millennial streaming with a more fundamentalist attitude as a member of a subdivision of the Society called the Arrowhead.
The series uses interesting terminology (translated):
‘Decree’ refers to the appearance of an ‘angel’ prophesying the death of a person. These are said to have happened outside of Korea but we only see the bodies/remains left behind, though Japan and Taiwan are mentioned.
‘Demonstration’ which refer to the moment when a person is dragged to hell. These begin as events and are eventually televised or streamed online, mostly by the New Truth Society in its advanced incarnation as a method of propaganda to further their aims.
‘Sin’ in this context is objective and inferred. You’d think it would be obvious and yet greed is literally cited as not being a sin, and members of the Arrowhead seem able to beat people to death without people lifting a finger, much less ‘angels’ spontaneously appearing. Sin is decided, for the most part, by societal constructs and the belief system propagated by the New Truth Society and the Arrowhead.
‘God’ is referred to however it’s important to understand while this entity is in the singular and referred to in the subs as ‘He’, God is never specified as being of a specific religious movement or background (though they lean heavily into a form popularised by cults such as the Westboro Baptist Church). This divinity is weaponised by the New Truth Society; according to them, God is vengeful and sick of humanity sinning without consequence, hence the appearance of the supernatural creatures designated as ‘angels’ and ‘demons’, however neither is tied to a specific religious hierarchy or mythology. However this ‘God’ is also capable of mistakes, as witnessed by Toughie.
‘Hell’ is similarly a universal concept; a place of pain and suffering beyond this world and the physical plane. We don’t see it in the series but it is implied to be connected to fire, and is also somewhere a person can return from.
The central narrative of the story bypasses the religious aspects and instead focuses on societal changes which occur after the first demonstration. It doesn’t matter if the angels and demons are in fact those, or even if they are aliens or just some phenomena we as a species don’t yet understand. The entities turn a strange event into a religious one by mentioning hell specifically. In the first three episodes, the focuses is on the adjustment phase.
Humanity are the ones who truly weaponise the degrees and demonstrations, with a collective of VIPs from the New Truth Society appearing, masked of course because zealots seldom show their true faces, and sit in judgement for Park Jeong-ja’s demonstration. Her home and the coffee shop where the first demonstration occured are later bought by the Society and turned into living memorials of the start of what Jeong Jin-soo calls ‘the new era’. There is a bronze statue of the three demons and the remains of Park Jeong-ja, a partial chest and skull, on full view in a glass case, along with blood spatter from her violent demise.
This will be important later.
© 2021 Netflix
The second arc is where things get interesting, theologically-speaking. In the intervening five years, the NTS has has gone from a NRM to as close to a state religion as the worldbuilding allows. People see demons and angels, thus the belief system of the Society must be true.
Around this time, the Society has also transitioned from its founder, Jeong Jin-soo, to his successor: Kim Jeong-chil and they are polar opposites. Jin-soo is young and pious, he is honest and likeable which makes him all the more dangerous as a cult leader. He is interested in the data and statistics surrounding degrees and while he is curious about the condemned sins’, he doesn’t outright label people. He is certain of himself and of what is occuring, leading to a surge in believers joining the Society. Shockingly, Jin-soo is also bound for Hell, having received a prophecy as a teenager, and is taken at the end of the third episode.
In contrast, Kim Jeong-chil is your typical cult leader stereotype. He appears first as a publisher of religious literature and steps in after Jin-soo’s death. He is fanatical and zealous, wearing flashy suits and turning demonstrations into live-streamed events which further the Society’s evolved belief that the doomed are sinners and need to be punished by society and the Society before they are dragged to hell.
He acts like a more fundamentalist preacher found in megachurches but while he believes, Jeong-chil doesn’t have the theological chops, panicking when they discover that the decree of Toughie breaks the group’s established doctrine, which doesn’t include the Christian concept of Original Sin. Though surrounded by advisors, he falls to pieces, revealing he is ultimately just power hungry but ultimately uneducated in the doctrines and arguments of the very religion he now leads.
Here we must also look at the Arrowhead. All religions and NRMs fracture at some point, it’s why we have so many variants of certain religions. Parent faiths turn into daughter spinoffs, often due to doctrinal changes or an issue with transition from one leader to another. The Arrowhead is the extremist faction of mainly disaffected teenagers who have the vigor and fanaticism of youth, they beat people up, policing people almost as a sanctioned vigilante group and if the Truth Society are the judges, they execute that twisted form of justice, headed by livestreamer Lee Dong-wook, who obscures his identity and raves online like a lunatic. But the Arrowhead also sinks into society, with members serving in the police, at telecoms companies and other bastions of the adult world.
The key point within this series is that the theological aspects are defined not by the supernatural entities who appear but by humans like Jeong Jin-soo. Humanity inferes sin on an otherwise strange supernatural event. This gets even more complicated after Toughie’s degree — the New Truth Society’s doctrine is ‘full of holes’ according to the narrative but God is also, according to the made-up-on-the-spot religious tenets of Kim Jeong-chil, capable of ‘mistakes’ and, under pressure, he names the hellbound Lee Dong-wook a ‘messiah’ figure in order to cement his loyalty. This then sends Lee into insanity as he tries to justify his crusade as God’s will, allowed due to his just-insinuated messianic status.
Regardless, we find ourselves watching as Toughie’s parents sacrifice themselves and the babe survives, suggesting the ‘demons’ can be fooled. As Toughie is taken by Min Hye-jin, saved from the deacons of the New Truth Society, and as Yuji beats a man for daring to suggest the Society are just opportunistic liars, we flash back to the sacred site of Park Jeong-ja’s demonstation where her body reconstructed, naked, in the ashes of her ruined apartment. This just leads to more questions:
Can God make mistakes?
Is this just to balance the taking of two innocent souls, in the form of Toughie’s parents Bae Young-jae and Song So-hyun?
Are these ‘demons’ in fact demons?
When is Season Two going to air and in what format?
I can’t wait to answer these in future blog posts and return to this thrilling series and it’s deep, religious-centric worldbuilding!
