Theme: Heaven

Heaven is the place in The Afterlife where God is believed to reside attended by his Angels. It is here that all virtuous souls are believed to go after death according to Christian belief. This is in contrast to Hell where The Devil resides and the sinful and wicked are condemned in the afterlife.

On screen, the standard portrayal of Heaven is usually as a realm of fluffy clouds where angels stand about with harps, or else as a bureaucracy where a soul’s deeds are recorded. It is sometimes ventured into via a long ladder or a tunnel of white light. There were a number of visits to Heaven during the Light Fantasy Films films of the 1940s, which as a rule tended to assume that Heaven is where everyone would go and avoided dealing with alternatives.

These depictions occurred up until the 1990s and still continue to do so mostly in light-hearted and comedic variations. The 1990s onwards is noted for a series of much more humanistic and non-Christian centred series of depictions of the afterlife, which move away from standard Heaven/Hell divisions. There has been some depictions of Heaven from different cultures, notedly Chinese and Japanese.