Alison Hell

This song is about a girl who thinks she is being terrorized by an evil spirit. She asks her parents for help, but when they ignore her pleas, she slowly goes insane. The song is based on a true story about a girl in Montreal who was in the news in the early '80s. In a Songfacts interview with Jeff Waters of Annihilator, he explained: "She had a mental disorder and her parents would lock her in her room because she was waking up with these nightmares about the Boogeyman and things like that. And the parents did this for a few years. The kid was really young, and she went into some kind of full-on mental breakdown and had to be institutionalized. I read that and for some reason, as a teenager, I thought that was neat. Looking back it obviously wasn't, but it became our biggest song."

Alice in Hell was the first album by the Canadian hardcore band Annihilator, and it was funded by a Factor Grant, which the government provided for bands that they are starting off in an effort to help developing acts in Canada. The album title is a joke on "Alice in Wonderland."

Annihilator guitarist Jeff Waters wrote this song with John Bates, who was the group's original lead singer. He left the band in 1985, but stayed in touch with Waters and occasionally wrote with him. He later recorded as a solo artist using the appellation "Big John Bates."