And you think your Mondays suck...
Factories made to look like one of the circles of Hell. This goes beyond the typical sweatshop aspects of long hours, slave wages, and
No OSHA Compliance. Those things may happen through negligence, but this factory cranks all those aspects
Up to Eleven on purpose, until the place is an enclosed
Crapsack World.
People are walking zombies there, and may die at any moment, while the cold, lifeless (or are they) machines don't stop moving. For some people,
death may be a release. Those at the top either live fat off their profits, or are suffering from the effects of the environment as well, likely going insane slowly. And expect various amounts of smog, smoke, and toxic waste being spewed outside.
This trope started when mainstream factories were sweatshops, and then people were horrified by the meat factory descriptions given in the book
The Jungle, and infamous
Real Life incidents like the
Triangle Shirtwaist fire
.
Compare
Dystopia,
Industrial Ghetto,
Polluted Wasteland.
Not to be confused with the band
Fear Factory.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Fan Fiction
Film
- The lower classes in Metropolis worked in a place like this.
- The Petpak pet food factory in the Razorback certainly qualifies as one.
- Swedish animated movie Resan Till Melonia has orphans forced to work in a Nightmarish Factory that covers an entire island. Kid Hero Ferdinand has escaped from there.
- Through its use of cinematography and lighting, The Machinist makes an ordinary machine shop seem this way.
- An entire city (at least) is like this in the Bad Future of Meet the Robinsons.
- In a short segment in Head, The Monkees are being walked through a factory - as the guide extols the good life it brings, Davy keeps seeing unsettling scenes - an employee drinks blood from a spigot, a desk worker's head drops off - but the others impatiently tell him to keep up.
Literature
- The meat packing industry in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle can be considered as the Trope Namer.
- The West German Steel Mill in Günther Wallraff's Ganz Unten) (The Lowest of the Low) was described to be a true hell factory for the workers. Just wondering how it may have been in East Germany...
- 19th century Swedish writer Viktor Rydberg wrote the poem "Den nya grottesången" ("The New Grotti Song"; the title is a reference to a magical mill in Norse Mythology that could mill gold out of nothing) to draw attention to the horrors of the industry of his era. Even little children are forced to work at the Grotti Mill, and the workers don't get food or water but are simply worked until they drop dead.
Live-Action TV
Tabletop Games
- Certain hive-cities and Forge Worlds in Warhammer 40000.
- Their Chaotic counterparts, Hell Forges, even more so.
- The entirety of Autochthonia, Realm of Brass and Shadow, in Exalted. It's the interior of a machine-god, and it's large enough to be a self-contained world.
Video Games
- Every Glukkon factory in Oddworld.
- The entirety of the Pitt in the Fallout 3 DLC of the same name.
- The infamous factory level in Kirby 64.
- In Alice: Madness Returns, the Hatter's Domain is this after being taken over by the March Hare and Dormy.
- The penultimate stage in Half-Life, The Factory, is an alien version of this.
- Stage 5 of Hard Corps: Uprising can be this. After sneaking in through what appears to be an ordinary (and poorly lit) base, the heroes are attacked by mechanical monsters that are constantly being dumped out onto conveyor belts. When defeated, they fall backwards and explode into pieces that can damage a character. The boss is a flying alien-looking fetus thing inside a case with mechanical arms and weapons attached to it. Bahamut experiences the real 'Nightmare' part of this trope. Playing as Krystal (and reading her storyline loading screen after this stage) reveals that those mechanical monsters used to be people, and that she could see Bahamut was visibly disturbed about gunning down what may have been be his ex-comrades.
- The pipe factory in Beneath A Steel Sky, where the Corrupt Corporate Executive in charge doesn't even bother to provide a radiation suit for the employee working with the nuclear reactor. Unsurprisingly, the employee in question is later found dead from radiation poisoning.
- Grunty Industries of Banjo-Tooie.
Web Original
Western Animation
