The meaning behind “Alison Hell”

Despite it looks like a complex video, Alison Hell is actually quite simple to analyze and understand. The innovative feature of this visual production is that it begins by showing its plot in a short and clear text. The video tells the story of a girl (or teenager) who claims to be haunted by an evil presence. However, her parents decide to ignore her claiming that the girl just wants to get attention, which eventually leads to more prolonged supernatural events that finally lead to madness.

The video starts in a conventional bedroom with a young teenage girl dressed in white pajamas getting ready for bed. She is accompanied by a doll with big black eyes, red hair and dressed in pajamas. Both rest on a bed and above them both there is a large window covered with dark white curtains. This first setting has a clear luminosity in white and blue sometimes intertwined and may indicate protection and tranquility that are natural states of the rational life we lead, is the representation of our state of harmony with the external environment or reality.

When the girl goes to sleep closing her eyes, we see an intercutting of images. The girl appears in a sleeping shot and thanks to the fade effect we can also see the image of a castle built on top of a mountain. Around her we see a dark and gloomy atmosphere with gray clouds and a full moon that slightly illuminates the landscape. This may indicate that the girl is going to have a nightmare. Let’s see what other elements the video adds.

In the oneiric level we can have a more contextual vision of the place where the girl is. We see a spacious, tidy, luxurious and clean Victorian style place. We see paintings of characters that seem to belong to the illustration era because of the way they dress. The interior lighting is dim and yellow probably because they want to exalt the use of candles that appear in some shots. This element is important because this color is associated with knowledge and wisdom. This visual representation allows us to infer the representation of a rational, orderly and safe environment. Nothing out of place or supernatural.

This represented order begins to break down when the girl wakes up (in the dream the video insinuates) and several disruptive elements begin to be noticed. First, we see that one of the windows of her room has opened, letting in a very strong breeze. From the girl’s facial expression, we infer that she has been awakened by the fear she feels of a hidden threat somewhere in her home. The shot opens up to see the same ordered scenario previously depicted, but with an odd detail. Recurring dolls appear scattered all over the place. On the furniture, on the floor.

We observe that somewhere a door opens in the middle of the darkness from which emerges a dense fog accompanied by an intense luminosity. The use of fog is very recurrent to create mysterious atmospheres associated with supernatural or spiritual phenomena. In this case the black background color is creating a dangerous atmosphere associated with an evil presence.

Sensing this drastic change in the environment, the girl wakes up with a terrified face. She gets up and decides to explore the place. She leaves her room, lights a candle and walks down the main corridor that will take her to the stairs leading to the second floor where the mysterious door is. As she walks along, she notices that some of the windows are decorated with religious figures. This sequence is interesting. The candle, for example, refers us to sanity, to clarity of thought, to rationality, but by reinforcing it with holy images it is suggested that the girl’s last line of defense is her faith in her spirituality associated with the rationality of her actions. This scene unifies both dimensions because from their conjunction will emerge the strength to confront their opposite which is darkness and evil.

Indeed, the collision occurs. In finding the source of the evil, the girl is strongly exposed to an intense light that causes her to panic. At first, we do not see what is the origin of her despair. The girl runs away to look for a way out. She finds a large window to which she clings to get out, but it is closed. As she begs for help, we see a creature emerge from the mysterious door. It is the same doll that the girl always held in her arms, but this one appears standing defiantly and coming out of the darkness. It is a macabre scene because we see how evil has invaded the innocence of a figure that was created to provide affection, and what we see is the opposite. The atmosphere that surrounds the creature only reinforces the sinister sense of the scene. We see only the outline of his being, the rest is a black figure. Behind it there is an intense light accompanied by a dense fog while a strong current of air blurs her dress and hair.

In the initial description of the video it is mentioned that this figure is the Bogeyman, a mythical being from hell whose victims are mainly children. However, the video takes a more complex direction in the interpretation. At the end we see that the girl ends up locked up asking for help from one of the windows while the infernal creature is behind her back. The interesting part comes later because the shot opens up and allows us to see a dying tree with horrific ramifications that are surrounding the windows of the place. The shot opens up more and allows us to see the castle that appeared earlier in the cast shot, but at the end we see it clearly. The girl is trapped in this hellish structure sitting on an abandoned, dark and evil mountain structure. The final message is clear: the girl has been trapped by madness (associated with elements opposed to the rational and sacred).