Comic Book / Cinema Purgatorio

This is sinerama.

Written by Alan Moore, Cinema Purgatorio was a comic series published by Avatar Press and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill. Beginning in 2016 and concluding in 2019, it was one of Moore's final works before his retirement in 2019. This series was the centerpiece of a larger Anthology Comic, also titled Cinema Purgatorio, where it ran alongside the Urban Fantasies Code Pru and The Vast, the Alternate History A More Perfect Union, and the Apocalyptic fantasy Modded.

The story itself takes place in the eponymous Cinema Purgatorio, a dilapidated old movie theatre with an unusual set of staff members and an equally unusual clientele. The nameless protagonist isn't sure how she ended up visiting, but always seems to find herself back at the cinema, waiting for a show - even if she isn't in the mood for it. At first, it seems more like a recurring dream than anything real, but things start to get suspicious when the protagonist finds herself waking up there.

The films themselves include everything from silent movies, comedies, animations, exploitation, B-movie monster flicks, superhero serials, mysteries, children's adventures, westerns, and even biopics. However, all of them are horribly morbid in one way or another, often discussing the horrors of early Hollywood or even more disturbing subjects. Equally confusing is the fact that nobody seems to notice anything amiss.

More worryingly, nobody seems in the mood to explain why or even how the protagonist keeps coming back for more...

---

This series provides examples of:

• Abominable Auditorium: The eponymous cinema is a slightly dilapidated venue plagued with terrible food, awful toilets, and a film lineup that ranges from the bewildering to the nightmarish. Much to the main character's confusion, once she enters, she finds herself unable to leave - and gradually bears witness to the collapse of the audience's sanity and the unveiling of the Purgatorio's true eldritch nature. As it turns out, the place is the Evil variety; it's essentially a very special kind of afterlife, with the staff and customers alike consisting entirely of damned souls condemned to live out eternity within its premises - including the protagonist, who is guilty of murdering her daughter.
• Actor/Role Confusion: In The Last Temptation of Old Mother Riley, Kitty switches between referring to Old Mother Riley as herself and as Arthur Lucan, whom plays her. Old Mother Riley, due to her imagining her actor's past as her own, likewise switches between referring to Kitty as her daughter (as she is in the films) and as her wife (as her actress was to Arthur), since both the character and the actress have the same name.
• Adaptational Villainy: In It's a Breakable Life, George Bailey, upon learning he's effectively immortal, quickly gains Immortality Immorality and does reckless stunts knowing it will only harm the stuntmen who protect him. He then kills Mr. Potter with his bare hands, deliberately ignoring his pleas for help, then ends the film bossing everyone around, implying things will only get worse from there.
  George: Every time God answers my prayers, an angel goes to intensive care.
• The Alcoholic:
  • The Warner Brothers: The Night At The Lawyers is pretty blunt in revealing that the Warner Brothers are happy to exploit the addictions of artists to win success, with Jack gloating that he has William Faulkner "drinking himself to death on a junior writer's salary," while "alcoholic serial divorcee" Busby Berkley makes a cameo shortly after making Jack a fortune with 42nd Street - and despite insisting that he's "perfectly shober," he's not only visibly and audibly pissed, but he's still got a martini in hand while driving. He immediately follows this up by getting into a three-car collision.
  • Pat the Dog in And The Blackness Moved is introduced drunk and being brought home so he can sober up... whereupon he just starts drinking again the moment Otto's out of the apartment. Truth in Television, as the real Pat Sullivan spent his final days as an Addled Addict.
  • George Reeves in The Last Adventure begins descending into alcoholism as the years go by, with one panel depicting him half-naked, unshaven, and surrounded by empty bottles. For good measure, the narration - which has been treating Reeves' life as a Superman serial - directly compares alcohol to kryptonite. Again, Truth in Television.
• Alien Geometries:
  • At one point, the protagonist gets sick of the theatre and tries to leave via the emergency exit; she just finds herself entering the theatre all over again.
  • During the final issue, the protagonist ends up sitting directly in front of herself, watching herself react to the last film exactly as she normally would.
• And I Must Scream:
  • During the climax of Hell's Angles, Howard Hughes dies after having spent the last few years of his life as a prisoner of his own neuroses in an isolated cinema... only to find that his afterlife features him being doomed to spend eternity alone in the same theatre.
  • The staff and patrons of the Cinema Purgatorio don’t seem to be able to leave the building, and most seem too locked in their own roles to meaningfully interact with each other. Insanity only leaves them even more disconnected... and the fact that they can only eat cinema food and sleep in the toilets only makes things more unbearable. It’s actually Hell.
• Animalistic Abomination: The creature the protagonists encounter in the theater in The Picture Palace Mystery resembles a centipede. It's capable of crawling anywhere undetected, its legs have a poisonous touch, it can coil around the sun, and its presence can cause the area below it to dissolve.
• Art Shift: Each film that is shown has a different art-style ranging from a Western to a mystery horror thriller to an inkblot cartoon.
• Author Powers: In And The Blackness Moved, the animator actively intrudes upon the events of the story just so it can be made clear that Pat suffers entirely for the amusement of his creator. He then erases the environment around him in favour of a Blank White Void, draws in a gallows that Pat can walk off, and paints in an endless shadow that Pat can tumble into. He reappears in the final issue, erasing Bugsy Siegel from the comic.
• Back for the Finale: All of the screen stars come back one last time, but not in a movie—in the cinema, to haunt the protagonist until she forces herself into the projection room.
• Bait-and-Switch: Throughout the comic, the protagonist is shown to spite at a woman named Geraldine and blaming her for her predicament. It's not until the end that it's revealed that Geraldine was her daughter, who only wanted to spend time with her flighty mother...and that the protagonist killed her.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The protagonist always wanted to be in the movies... now it seems she can't get away from them. By the end, she's become a permanent staff member, working the projector for all the other damned souls at the cinema.
• Bilingual Bonus: Not that it's much different from the English translation, but the cinema is literally named "Purgatory Cinema" in Italian, giving you a first guess to its nature. And only a partially correct one, since it seems closer to hell.
• Bland-Name Product: A King at Twilight was produced by "WKO Wireless Pictures", a riff on RKO Pictures. Other major film companies established are "Necro Golden Mane" and "Paranorm Pictures".
• Born in the Theatre: Played for horror in The Picture Palace Mystery— the Eldritch Abomination that menaces the protagonists can be just as easily explained as a hair in the projector gate and the film jamming and melting. Unlike most examples of this trope, the characters never consider this, or may even be unable to. It's briefly played for laughs in the beginning, when Aunt Millie complains that her previous projectionists snuck out parts of her film reels that could only be called fanservice in the loosest sense of the term; the scene immediately hard cuts to Aunt Millie bringing the Clue Club to the theater after they returned from a family beach trip, implying her scenes during the missing sequence were subjected to the same treatment.
• Character Filibuster: From A King at Twilight onward, the protagonists of most of the biopics spend their time monologuing about their life story, troubles in Hollywood, or other random tidbits they know. Lampshaded by the protagonist in the final issue, where she admits she hates movies that do this and fervidly believes in Show, Don't Tell.
• Cliffhanger Copout: The Flame of Remorse Returns riffs on old serials tendency to do this by having the criminals repeatedly try to kill the titular hero and his partner Dita who, in the very next moment, are always revealed to have survived in increasingly impossible ways.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Having realized that none of them can leave the cinema, the audience have resignedly adjusted to spending the rest of their days in the building, to the point that they have given up on trying to leave and simply sleep on the lobby floor. The protagonist eventually joins them when she realizes that she's now permanently hired as projector.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: The Picture Palace Mystery appears at first to be a juvenile adventure story in which three children try to stop an untrustworthy projectionist from ripping off their cinema-owning aunt. Instead, they find themselves confronted by an Eldritch Abomination that ends up killing one, blinding another and driving the third insane.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Any celebrity that shows up in a previously premiered movie typically has their traits retained in later ones. Fatty Arbuckle, for instance, keeps the uniform and shot-through eye of the cop role he played in Hushed Up! during his cameo in Revelations of the Bat, while the Warner Brothers resemble their appearances in A Night at the Lawyers.
  • The Picture Palace Mystery has marquees for the Flame of Remorse, Otz, and the Roman film from the second issue.
  • The Time of Our Lives shows up in Hell's Angles, with Howard Hughes identifying the actors in it as Kate Hepburn and Cary Grant. He also briefly watches Hushed Up!, wondering if the series it belonged to was filmed in his theater.
• Creepy Souvenir: At the end of It's A Breakable Life, George Bailey is keeping Mr. Potter's severed head impaled on a paper spike as a memento.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Dick of The Picture Palace Mystery has the lower half of his body dissolved by an Eldritch Abomination, leaving a gory mess that Mr. Crawley is forced to hastily cover with a sheet.
• Deadly Bath: The protagonist was originally shanked to death in the shower, finding the hard way that child-killers don't do well in prison.
• Death of a Child:
  • The real life murders of Willis H. O'Brien's sons, William and Willis Jr., are referenced in A King at Twilight.
  • Tod Browning's wife murdering his kid is covered as a sideshow scene in his chapter.
  • During the centipede's attack in The Picture Palace Mystery, half of Dick's body is gruesomely dissolved.
  • Geraldine was murdered by her own mother when her pleas to spend time with her became one too many.
• Disgusting Public Toilet: The Cinema's toilets are gross, graffitied and occasionally flooded, but the protagonist has no other choice but to use them. To add insult to injury, there's no toilet paper, forcing visitors to wipe their asses with the terrible magazines sold at the cinema. Later, as her inability to leave the building becomes apparent, she's forced to sleep there too, if only because it’s impossible to get any rest in the theatre itself.
• Do Not Spoil This Ending: Revelations of the Bat begins with a disclaimer to not spoil the mystery for the audience.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In The Abandoned Sunset, the way in which some of the characters are not identified within the comic, with the reader left to do their own research, is reminiscent of the practice of "blind items" in the scandal sheets the story deals with, in which the subjects were not identified by name but strongly hinted at.
• Dogfaces: In And The Blackness Moved, Otz the Cat and Pat the Dog have humanoid faces and styled fur that resemble the figures they were based on, Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan.
• Double-Meaning Title: The final film is called One Hell of a Girl, which can be said as "someone who is big/interesting/important". But the title also reflects either Geraldine living with an abusive mother was Hell, or the fact that the movie reflects the actions of our protagonist has now dropped her in the Cinema Purgatorio, which is now become her Hell.
• Downer Ending:
  • Almost all of the films shown at the Purgatorio tend to feature depressing, horrific or deliberately unsatisfying endings, from villains getting away with everything to heroes suffering humiliating defeats. A few exceptions exist, but they are far and few between - and they're usually still quite morbid.
  • The final issue of the comic ends with the protagonist realizing that she's dead and the Purgatorio is her punishment; she'll spend the rest of eternity here and there'll never be any chance for redemption or forgiveness. As vile as her crime was, it's still pretty depressing.
• Eagleland: The cynical variant. The George Reeves biopic ends on him being immortalized as a man who embodies all of America's ideals—but given that by the end of his life he was a pretty hard-to-deal-with man and a constant womanizer, that isn't a good sign.
• Eldritch Location: The eponymous cinema is odd, to say the least. The protagonist has no idea how she keeps finding herself there, attempts to leave via the emergency exit only lead to her winding up right back in the theatre, and elements from the films seem to end up rubbing elbows with real people over the course of the series. As it turns out, the name is quite deliberate: Cinema Purgatorio is actually a hellish afterlife that the protagonist has been condemned to for all eternity.
• Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: In The Picture Palace Mystery, the youngest member of the trio, Titty, replaces all her Rs with Ws - resulting in black comedy when horrific injury befalls her and the first words out of her mouth are "Chwist pweserve me!"
• Establishing Series Moment: In the first issue, just after the cover is a clipping from the cinema's in-house magazine Screen Regrets: a picture of a smiling Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the quote "Sometimes I wish I was dead!", establishing the series' (and the magazine's) cynical eye on Hollywood. The clipping retains its position in later issues.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In One Hell of a Girl, the prisoners do not take kindly to the woman who killed her own daughter and tried to frame it as a sex crime.
• Eye Scream: Titty of The Picture Palace Mystery ends up getting smacked in the face by a Lovecraftian horror's tentacle, resulting in her eyes blistering into hideous sores, leaving her blind.
• The Faceless: Geraldine in One Hell of a Girl. Her only major scene is shot from her perspective, and even when she's technically Unseen No More at the end, she's shown through an undetailed photograph.
• Family Theme Naming: The three child heroes of The Picture Palace Mystery are siblings named Dick, Fanny and Titty.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Mr. Flicker seems eager to introduce the protagonist to the film projector. Guess what job she ends up being stuck with when her stay at the cinema turns out to be permanent?
  • The projector itself is adorned with Egyptian mythology imagery, particularly the Eye of Horus, the ankh, and what appears to be Anubis. All are associated with the afterlife.
  • In The Picture Palace Mystery, the projectionist Mr. Crawley is a shifty figure that is implied to lead the Clue Club to their doom. Titty even suggests that he might be behind the "curse" affecting the films. Like Crawley, Mr. Flicker's name reflects his connection to the theater ("Crawl" as in an opening crawl or a centipede's movements, "Flicker" as in the light of a projector), he appears at key points to influence the narrator, and the films he chooses set the narrator up for her fate.
  • When the narrator watches A King at Twilight, she's notably unnerved when King Kong monologues about his ex-wife murdering their kids, wondering what would bring a person to do so. As One Hell of a Girl shows, the narrator has some experience with it.
  • In fact, a lot of the movies shown involve some measure of child neglect or parents killing their children like Hushed Up mentioning how a child's missing and most of the time it's the parents who did it. Given the cinema staff's knowing glances, they likely intentionally chose a selection of movies that deliberately played to her past actions.
  • The only movie that the protagonist actually seemed to like was It's a Breakable Life, which details how George finally gets his payback at Potter, kills the man who's made his life miserable, and lives in the success he feels he's earned — but in a way that, in contrast to the film it parodies, reveals him to be exploitative and uncaring of the harm he inflicts on others. Throughout the whole comic, we learn that the protagonist has similarly victimized herself when thinking back on her relationship with Geraldine, and constantly justifies her actions by saying that she was liberating herself from her child's clinginess.
  • The Last Temptation of Old Mother Riley is probably the most explicit of the foreshadowing elements, centered around a sympathetic old woman and her nagging, controlling daughter/wife which also served as a metaphor for the tumultuous relationship between Arthur Lucan and his wife Kitty. More or less, this is what the protagonist thinks of Geraldine and why she kills the girl.
  • The protagonist hates the ending to Freaks of the Lens, as she doesn't like its message that "normal" people can meet the criteria of "freaks" just as much as those they work with. Much like the antagonists of the film it parodies, her moral bankruptcy belies her "normal" appearance, and the "freaks" of the Purgatorio bring her into their ranks.
  • She also found The Flame of Remorse Returns unnerving due to the theme of being forced to confront one’s own sins, unable to escape damnation.
  • At the end of My Fair Dahlia, when the film (a retelling of the Black Dahlia murder) finishes, a woman sitting a few rows behind the protagonist has a sudden mental breakdown and screams "Oh God! Oh no, it's me! It's me!" before running out of the theatre, coincidentally after the protagonist has just stretched in her seat. This exact same sequence of events occurs in the final issue when the protagonist herself realises that the movie she's just watched is about herself and that she's trapped in Hell. The identity of the other woman is never revealed, but given where the protagonist was sitting when she had the same breakdown compared to when she witnessed it, it's implied that the other woman was her future self.
  • The plot of And The Blackness Moved, where Pat projects his insecurities and justifies his terrible actions before getting the rug pulled under him in a supernatural situation he's forced to comply with, is basically the protagonist's life in the theater as an animated short.
  • Before the narrator watches My Fair Dahlia, a poster for a film called From Here to Maternity with a poster of a man and woman reclining on a beach can be seen. This reflects the protagonist as she was a mother who could never get a chance to pursue a love life.
  • In-film example: The Picture Palace Mystery opens with Aunt Millie talking about how the films shown in her theatre have been plagued by reels in the wrong order, cut out scenes, and debris on the projector. Immediately after, a scene is skipped over, and the reel that shows the Clue Club investigating the theatre is played after the end reel — and what they find is a centipede that resembles a stray hair, and acid that gradually dissolves everything it touches akin to a Melting-Film Effect.
• Foreign Remake: Discussed by the narrator as she watches One Hell of a Girl. She notes it has several Britishisms despite being a Hitchcock pastiche, and considering she recognises the plot, suspects it to be an American remake of a British movie. It is — of her (a British woman's) murder of her daughter Geraldine.
• The Ghost: The protagonist occasionally mentions a woman she resents named Geraldine, who apparently ruined a relationship she had and subsequently her life. Not only is Geraldine revealed to be a child, but all that resentment is from the protagonist having to raise her in place of pursuing her love life.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Upon finding herself face to face with an Eldritch Abomination coiling around the sun in The Picture Palace Mystery, Fanny's mind completely snaps - not helped by the horrific death of her brother. She's later found sitting catatonically, mumbling about having seen God.
• The Grim Reaper: The titular Bat of Revelations of the Bat introduces themself as "the very soul of murder and enigma", and claims they will be present for everyone's eventual death as they were Thelma Todd's. While the characters themselves are skeptical, thinking they may be someone involved with the case, unmasking them only shows the Bat's cape was hiding nothing at all, and that they really were just an incarnation of Death.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: As soon as Otz tucks Pat into bed and wishes him well in the morning, Pat himself takes a swig of his alcohol and tells the audience he's always hated that Otz got all the credit for creating Felix the Cat.
• Hint Dropping: Several films the protagonist sees appear to encourage her looking into what's going on at the cinema. It starts with The Picture Palace Mystery having three kids react in horror upon finding something wrong in the theater that permanently scars them (with the in-universe film's projectionist even dropping hints that he could've been behind it), and gets blunter until Hell's Angles outright shows a dead person cursed to watch his sins for eternity, "in this Cinema... in this Purgatory". Only when a movie about her plays does she finally get the hint.
• Horrible Hollywood: Many of the films discuss the corruption and injustice at work in Hollywood throughout the first half of the 20th century. Some feature direct jabs at specific creators like Jack L. Warner; others take aim at more general aspects, like the exploitation of stuntmen, discrimination against minorities, criminal behaviour being swept under the rug and so forth.
• Hypocritical Humor: The narrator prefers the Show, Don't Tell approach to movies, and appreciates when films can have a scene of silence compared to constant exposition — which is why her mental commentary is shown throughout One Hell of a Girl, especially during the quiet parts.
• I Can Explain: At the end of Abandoned Sunset, Howard Rushmore, writer for the infamous Confidential tabloid, attempts to justify his career by a combination of this and a downplayed version of …But He Sounds Handsome. His lying that he is not Rushmore is so blatant that the other morgue inhabitants (Sal Mineo, Lana Turner, Gloria Swanson, Chalky Wright, and Alvah Bessie) immediately give him the Silent Treatment after he tries to ask forgiveness.
• Improvised Lockpick: In the cartoon short And The Blackness Moved, the cat Otz uses his own Confused Question Mark to pick the lock on Pat's door when he loses his keys.
• In the Style of: Many of the movies on display are essentially biopics told in a fashion deliberately reminiscent of iconic styles of film from the early-to-mid 20th century. Among other things...
  • And The Blackness Moved tells the story of Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan in the style of the silent Felix the Cat cartoons. In-universe, it is also supposed to resemble a comic book.
  • The life of Willis H. O'Brien (the animator behind King Kong (1933)) is told through a King Kong movie.
  • The story of the Warner Brothers is a comedy modeled on the Marx Brothers.
  • The gruesome Black Dahlia murder and the media furor around it is retold as a musical.
  • A harrowing tale of the trials undergone by stunt doubles is framed as a cynical retelling of It's a Wonderful Life.
  • The mysterious death of Thelma Todd is presented as a 1930s melodramatic horror-thriller in the vein of The Bat Whispers.
  • The life of Arthur Lucan is told through a pantomime starring his character Old Mother Riley.
  • The life of Tod Browning is retold as a sideshow of the kind featured in his most famous work, Freaks; it's even narrated by Harry Earles and ends with Browning being accepted into the ranks of the freaks - complete with the famous line of "one of us!"
  • The Abandoned Sunset is based on an unused opening sequence from Sunset Boulevard, where Joe's body would have been taken to the morgue and his death a subject of discussion between him and the other corpses.
  • The biopic of George Reeves is filmed and narrated like it's a Superman serial.
  • One Hell Of A Girl, as the protagonist notes, is stylistically reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock movie; she even remarks that the murderous heroine looks like Janet Leigh, to the point that she even dies in the shower... up until the protagonist belatedly realizes that it's actually meant to be her.
• Ironic Hell:
  • In After Tombstone, actors known for playing parts in Westerns are condemned to return to the stereotypical frontier town and re-enact the cliched narratives over and over again - usually keeping all the injuries they acquired the last time they were gunned down. The sheriff speculates that they'll have to do this until they can find a version of history they can all live with.
  • Hell's Angles features Howard Hughes dying just as he did in the real world, only to wind up right back in his private cinema at the start of his descent into madness, watching movies alone while in thrall to his own neuroses for all eternity.
  • As the final issue makes clear the Cinema Purgatorio is the one overarching example of the entire series. Assorted ne'er-do-wells are condemned to spend eternity here for the crimes they committed in life, either as customers or staff; the woman in the ticket booth is there for procuring children for her rapist husband, the usherette is there for embezzling money from a school, and Mr. Flicker looks suspiciously like Adolf Hitler. As for the protagonist, she's guilty of murdering her daughter - more specifically, in a fit of rage over being prevented from going to the pictures with her new boyfriend - and for that, she becomes the projectionist.
• Irony: The protagonist complains a lot about movies that spend more time telling rather than showing, praising movies that leave some quiet and implied scenes, leaving to the viewer the chance to piece things together. However, the story shows that she herself is entirely unable to read between the lines, failing to notice the recurring themes between films and truly unsubtle hints being dropped until the Cinema drops all pretenses and straight-up shows her a movie about her own life. And even then she only takes notice at the very end.
• Just One Little Mistake: As the final film, One Hell Of A Girl, reveals, the protagonist of the comic did her best to make it look as if someone else had murdered her daughter; she wrapped the body in a carpet, dumped it in the swamps some distance from her house, and even pulled down the corpse's underwear to make it look like a sex crime. She then called the police to report a missing person, clearly hoping that this would be enough to put them on the wrong track... only for her to be undone by the photo provided to the police: in the picture, her daughter can be seen standing on the very carpet she was found wrapped up in. From there, her arrest, confession and conviction swiftly followed.
• Just the Introduction to the Opposites:
  • It's a Breakable Life is It's a Wonderful Life with all the main plot points flipped: instead of George learning how the people in his life would suffer if he was never born, he instead learns how the "angels" (stuntmen) currently suffer to keep him alive — effectively meaning that he can never die. Rather than take this to heart and learn to appreciate their role in his life, he becomes even more reckless and cares little for who he puts in harm's way. And while he ousts Mr. Potter and improves his living situation, his final comments imply his upcoming "Baileyville" is going to be Potterville in all but name.
  • The big reveal of the protagonist's circumstances—that she used to go from boyfriend to boyfriend while her daughter pleaded with her to spend time together, hated how clingy the girl was, and the relationship blowing up after she couldn't go on a date— would in any other universe be happening to a Bratty Teenage Daughter and Her Beloved Smother, not a grown woman and her 10 year old child.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: While George Reeves is allowed to have his role as Superman referred to in the serial, his costume always conspicuously has the S shield cut off of it. Justified in-story by his claim to give away the emblems on his suits when he's done filming for the season.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: Discussed. Lana Turner in Abandoned at Sunset rather ruefully recalls when Sandra Dee—only 12 at the time— was criticized by the public for having an "aura of virginity" in Imitation of Life while directors were eager to capitalize on some of her own raw relationships.
• Meaningful Echo: A woman freaks out at the ending of My Fair Dahlia by going, "Oh God! Oh no, it's me! It's me!" before running away. At the end of One Hell of a Girl, the protagonist screams this when she realizes that the film is portraying her crime of killing her own daughter.
• Mistaken for Flirting: The protagonist mistakes Mr. Flicker's invitation to the projector room for him making a pass at her. When she starts to undress and he doesn't react as she'd thought, she quickly runs back to her seat out of sheer embarrassment.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After murdering her daughter in the final film, the protagonist looks genuinely horrified at what she's done - not enough to turn herself in, of course...
• Naked Nutter:
  • In Hell's Angles, Howard Hughes is introduced in the nude and in thrall to his obsessive-compulsive disorder, though he is quick to insist that this is completely rational.
  • By the final issue, the usherette has given up on wearing clothes and is now doing her job stark naked; can later be seen masturbating over the brutal murders occurring in the last film. Presumably, she's been driven insane by being trapped in the Purgatorio as punishment for her sins.
• Never a Runaway: Discussed at the end of Hushed Up! One of the Fatal Officers gets a call from the station that a child's been reported missing, which he bets the parents were responsible for.
• Never My Fault: The protagonist keeps describing her interactions with Geraldine in a way that blames Geraldine for what happened, in a way that starts to seem increasingly suspect. Made certain when we learn that Geraldine was not, as we may have thought, a jealous romantic rival, but in fact the protagonist's ten-year-old daughter.
• No Name Given: The protagonist is never given a name.
• Non-Linear Character: After moving seats, the protagonist begins to see herself in her old seat watching the movies, but never quite pieces together that it's her. The woman she saw in a previous issue having a Freak Out was her, in her current seat, discovering the truth about her death.
• Noticing the Fourth Wall:
  • One of the early films features two characters in a Roman Empire Period Piece becoming aware of the fourth wall and the artifice of the movie they are in, to the point that they even notice the studio and other actors in waiting just off-screen... without ever gaining awareness that they are mere fictional characters within that movie. Growing increasingly horrified by things like wristwatches, prop scrolls without writing, and fake beards, one of the characters comes to the realization that his entire life is a lie and begs to be put out of his misery; the other tries to oblige, only to find that his sword is made of wood, forcing him to slowly and painfully strangle his co-star to death. In the end, the remaining actor is left alone, staring in existential terror as the scene fades out around him.
  • In the animated feature And The Blackness Moved, Pat the dog has the nature of reality made obvious to him when his creator begins actively altering the environment around him. As with the previous film, Pat is left so overwhelmed with existential dread that he can only march despairingly to the doom the animator has painted for him.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The bumbling cops in Hushed Up! at first appear to be unwitting Destructive Saviors when they barrel their way through town to stop a bank robbery. When they get both the robbers and the hostages killed in a farcical shootout, the one cop that calls them out on it gets killed as well, before the rest loot the crime scene and head back to the station.
• Obvious Stunt Double: Becomes a plot point in one film; here, in It's A Breakable Life, George Bailey is nearly killed by a series of accidents - only to find himself unharmed, the fatal experiences being endured by people who look only somewhat like him. Eventually, he's approached by a stuntman in place of Clarence; he explains that they're in a movie and that for every fatal incident he experiences, a stunt double has to endure it for the sake of the scene. Unfortunately, far from teaching him to respect the rights of the poor stunt doubles who suffer in his stead, this lecture teaches Bailey that he is effectively immortal, and he uses this new power to turn the tables on Mr. Potter, kill him and take over the town - at the cost of yet another stuntman being shot down by Potter's bodyguards.
• Oh, Crap!: One Hell of a Girl: the mother has this look when the police point out that she made a huge mistake; the picture she gave them of the girl who died was standing on a carpet. The very same carpet the mother used to wrap her body in.
• The One Guy: Mr. Flicker is the only man in the theatre staff protagonist included. Considering that the cinema is revealed to be an afterlife and the staff is being punished for their crimes, this as some implications about the criteria. Noticeably, one of them is there for providing victim to her husband, yet said husband doesn't seem to be among the damned souls there.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The final issue opens up with pretty much all of the cinema staff suddenly opening up to the protagonist and treating her much kinder than usual. The protagonist doesn't think too much of this, but when the final twist hits it's apparent that it's because they know the protagonist will be getting properly "hired" soon.
• Pariah Prisoner: In the backstory, the protagonist murdered her daughter and ended up getting sent to prison for it; as a child-killer, she was immediately despised by the other inmates, who eventually ambushed her in the showers and shanked her to death following a brief "The Reason You Suck" Speech - hence why she’s now trapped in the Cinema.
• Plot-Based Voice Cancellation: Played with. The protagonist is initially told by the receptionist that she'd appreciate something different for adults and children, but she mumbles the last word. Every other time she appears to say it clearly, but the protagonist by that point has tuned her out. It turns out she was referring to the different charges one gets when convicted for crimes involving minors.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: For all the things Jacko controls, he doesn't seem to know a lot about his Animation department — he takes one look at it, with all the workers inside stylized like Looney Tunes characters, and guesses that they're in charge of making Mickey Mouse shorts. Reportedly Truth in Television, though the part about Mickey Mouse is attributed to Harry Warner.
• Rapid Aging: In The Time Of Our Lives, a young couple prepare to move into a new house, oblivious to the fact that time has started accelerating on the property, most commonly signified by months falling off the calendar. Before long, the husband and wife begin to feel the effects, aging as they inspect the house until they start to forget what they were doing there in the first place. Confused, they head downstairs to find that the floor is now swamped with torn-off pages from the calendar; as soon as he reaches the landing, the now-ancient husband suffers a heart attack and collapses into the sea of paper, dying somewhere under it. By now too senile to remember her husband or where she is, the wife weeps in terror for the remaining panels of the comic until, too old to claw her way out of the rising mass of paper, she sinks beneath the surface and dies as well.
• Red Herring: The focus on the world of film and the lives and deaths of stars at first gives the impression that the Purgatorio is an afterlife for movie personnel, best shown when a woman runs out of the theater in shock during My Fair Dahlia, implying she's the spirit of Elizabeth Short seeing her own death play out on screen. While the cinema is an afterlife, it's a general Hell for all kinds of sinners; the woman turns out to be the protagonist as she's watching her own murder and death play out.
• Rule of Symbolism: The film characters' cameos outside of their work tend to have an additional meaning to it:
  • Two of the Fatal Officers briefly appear in the corrupt LA Police Department shown in My Fair Dahlia, counting their spoils.
  • The Flame of Remorse and his partner Dita LaRue are two of the last characters to corner the protagonist, which occurs in a sequence where she's forced to confront the severity of her actions.
• Running Gag: Bugsy Siegel's bullet-ridden corpse keeps reappearing in various films, usually for the sake of Black Comedy. The Peek-a-Boo Corpse the narrator sees in the front row is also implied to be Bugsy, as his couch is later brought in for people to use.
• Shout-Out:
  • The title of the anthology is one word off from the classic movie Cinema Paradiso, which also centered around an old cinema.
  • Before Pat jumps into the black void the animator painted in, he muses that he's going "into the inkwell".
  • For that matter, the animator's interventions in the cartoon are essentially presented as what Duck Amuck would have looked like it if were done using 1920s and 1930s animation techniques... and if it were played for horror instead of comedy.
  • As the protagonist complains over becoming permanently part of the Purgatorio staff, she points out that the job has no vacations, no pay, and No Exit.
  • Issue #9 retells the story of Thelma Todd and her mysterious death in the vein of The Bat Whispers, a 1930s horror-thriller about a mysterious criminal called the Bat haunting a sinister old house. The story goes on to establish several curious links between Todd's death and the Batman franchise. The Bat Whispers was actually quoted as an inspiration on Batman.
• Signs of Disrepair: By issue #10, the lights on the theater sign start flickering out and are in need of repair. At first, the illuminated letters read out the comical expression "IN A GATOR", but its next appearance in issue #11 instead reads "IN PURGATORI", highlighting the strangeness (and true nature) of the place.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Geraldine, the protagonist's daughter, doesn't appear until the final issue. But her death is what starts the story, as her mother gets damned to the Cinema for the crime.
• Speech-Centric Work: A King at Twilight is about King Kong, standing in for Willis H. O'Brien, telling a short summary of his life before and after getting famous for his stop motion work while going through a typical plot.
• Splash of Color: The covers are in black and white, with a bit of red splashed in.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: As he recounts his increasingly aggressive measures to satisfy his own neuroses, Howard Hughes pointedly remarks that he's just checking his sanity and that there's absolutely nothing irrational about what he's doing, because all of his methods are so obviously rational - including the fact that he's currently naked for "hygiene reasons."
• Take That!: The Picture Palace Mystery mocks the Children's Film Foundation films' purported tendencies to be saccharine and dull to their intended audience by having it swiftly turn gruesome. Even the protagonist notes that all the kids used to boo the CFF logo whenever it came up at shows when she was young.
• Tempting Fate: Twice done in The Last Temptation of Old Mother Riley:
  • After going over her actor's life, Old Mother Riley talks about how her character is an inspiration and will live forever, seconds before she has a fatal heart attack on stage. A call then comes in informing the audience Kitty gets all the merchandising rights.
  • After her ghost scares off Kitty and her husband, Old Mother Riley then celebrates how nothing can stop her now, only to be cut off by the end card.
• Terror Hero: The Flame of Remorse of the superhero serial; he's capable of essentially controlling time through cuts, proving so unstoppable that the villains are overwhelmed with Neverending Terror - to the point that they have no choice but to confront their innermost guilt.
• They Just Dont Get It: The protagonist is really dense over what the films are actually trying to tell her, up to the end of Helluva Girl being a recreation of her life, including murdering her daughter and being shanked in a prison shower. It's not until she gets to that last line does it finally click.
• Title, Please!: The Glory That Was Rome does not reveal its title throughout the issue it debuts in, only being seen on a marquee in the Purgatorio the issue after. Justified, as the protagonist arrived to the film late.
• Token Good Cop: Played for Black Comedy. In Hushed Up!, a slapstick shootout between cops and robbers gets all the bystanders killed with their reckless aiming. Only one cop shows anger and calls attention to this, which gets him shot at the end by another member of the force to cover it up.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth:
  • In Hushed Up!, the lone cop that calls out the others for shooting the civilians is killed to keep him quiet.
  • In A Night at The Lawyers, Sammo is the least "funny" of the Warner Brothers and self-admittedly the most personable. When he becomes the first of them to die, he laments his brothers are going to steal the credit for his decisions.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • In The Flame of Remorse Returns, Joe Casey and his gang begin rapidly losing composure as their attempts to kill the eponymous hero fail in increasingly impossible ways, reflecting more and more on their misdeeds until some of them begin committing suicide out of sheer remorse. By the final frame, Casey himself is pleading for the world to end so he won't have to live with another minute of fear and guilt.
  • Pat of And The Blackness Moved quickly establishes himself as villain material, having ripped off his friend Otz, raped a fourteen-year-old and possibly murdered his wife. However, the moment the animator reveals his power over the film, Pat goes from bitter grumbling to screaming terror in a single panel, until the existential terror drives him to follow the animator's cues and jump to his death.
  • One Hell Of A Girl ends with the protagonist of the comic itself beginning to scream as she finally realizes that she's watching her own fate play out on the screen - concluding with her being murdered in prison; fleeing the theater in a blind panic, she's herded upstairs to the projector, where she despairingly succumbs to the revelation that she's been condemned to remain a prisoner of the Cinema Purgatorio for all eternity.
• Wham Line:
  • After the showing of My Fair Dahlia, what one woman was heard shouting before she ran out indicated that the movies weren't just there for entertainment:
  Woman: Oh God! Oh no, it's me! It's me!
  • One Hell of a Girl has the mother trying to clean in the prison showers suddenly surrounded by numerous prisoners with screwdrivers. But for what reason?
  Prisoner #1: Who could have killed somebody and pulled her panties down like it was a sex crime. Your own ten-year-old daughter, you heartless bitch!
  Prisoner #2: Your own girl, poor little Gera...
• Would Hurt a Child: The protagonist brutally murdered her own daughter in a fit of rage, hence why she's trapped in the Purgatorio.

Tropes applying to the other comics in the anthology:

• Art Evolution: In both A More Perfect Union and Modded, a drastic art change hits due to both initial artists changing. The former was fully grayscale with detailed backgrounds in Michael Dipascale's hands before changing to the stark monochrome of Gabriel Andrade's other work in the anthology, The Vast. Meanwhile, Modded starts out with a rougher and grungier look courtesy of Ignacio Calero before switching to the cleaner digital art of Nahuel Lopez.
• Bug War: "A More Perfect Union" features the forces of the United States under General Lee fighting giant ants.
• Good Taming, Evil Taming: The Americans in "The Vast" bond one trainer per kaiju, treating it with kindness. The Russians use a mass-production approach of beating them into submission.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: A dark example. In Modded, the monster collector here, Tommy Zero, is portrayed as a sadistic bully who simply wants to collect every Modded that ever exists and use them to fight, even if they aren't suited for it. Already having over 500 daemons under his belt, he decides to fight and capture the young girl Fringe's dog-demon Fluffbumble on a whim.
• Kaiju: The monsters in "The Vast" are actually referred to as Kaiju, being mutated creatures mutated beyond recognition.
• Mon: The culture behind using the Modded is the fantasy apocalyptic flavor of this. Daemonatrixes capture them with a rope shaped like a demon summoning circle, they're pit against each other to fight in competitions, and some people are willing to go on journeys to collect every Modded they can. These creatures can also, as their name implies, be modified to have more powerful weapons, limbs, or simply recolored as their owner wishes.
• Tamer and Chaster: While Modded remains a crass romp throughout the work, many of the lewder jokes were toned down as time went on.

---