What The Afterlife Looks Like, According To Hollywood

In the movie Flatliners (out September 29), a group of precocious medical students discover a way to reach the afterlife — and then come back again. At first, the students' extreme, heart-stopping experiment achieves thrilling results. While flatlining, each student hallucinates, and returns to life feeling super-charged. But playing with metaphysics of the Great Beyond is a bad idea. Soon, everyone is pursued by visions that threaten to pull them back to the other side.

Flatliners never actually shows us what heaven looks like, but other movies have tried. After all, who hasn't sketched out a mental vision of the Great Beyond at some point? Are there palm trees and cotton candy bushes? Are there chocolate fountains and everyone you ever loved in one big room? And is it wonderful?

Since everyone has a different interpretation of the world after this one (which may or may not exist), each movie does, too. Here's what cinema has told us to expect in the afterlife.