Jacob’s Ladder is a 1990 American psychological horror film[4] directed by Adrian Lyne, produced by Alan Marshall and written by Bruce Joel Rubin. It stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, an American infantryman whose experiences during his military service in Vietnam result in strange, fragmentary visions and bizarre hallucinations that continue to haunt him. As his ordeal worsens, Jacob desperately attempts to learn the truth. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Peña and Danny Aiello.
The film’s title refers to the Biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder, or the dream of a meeting place between Heaven and Earth (Genesis 28:12). Its little-known alternative title is Dante’s Inferno, in a reference to Inferno by Dante Alighieri.[6][7][8] Screenwriter and co-producer Bruce Joel Rubin perceived the film as a modern interpretation of the Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.[9][10] Rubin said: “The inspiration in a sense is my entire spiritual upbringing. Once you have a meditative life you start to see that the world is really far different than what it appears to be. What appears to be finite is really couched in the infinite, and the infinite imbues everything in our lives.”[11] Before writing his scripts for Jacob’s Ladder and Ghost, which too was released in 1990, the Jewish-born Rubin spent two years in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal