In Eastern Christianity the descent, rather than the empty tomb, is the standard image of the resurrection. The Anastasis icon shows Christ standing on the shattered leaves of the doors of the underworld, which lie crossed beneath his feet with the broken locks, nails and hinges scattered around them, while he takes Adam by the wrist, not by the hand, and pulls him bodily out of a sarcophagus, with Eve reaching from the other side and the righteous of the older covenant ranked behind. The detail of the wrist is deliberate and is remarked on in Orthodox commentary: the one being rescued is not cooperating in the rescue. This icon is what appears in Orthodox churches at Easter, and its theology is that of Holy Saturday, the day between.
In the Latin West the same material took a more dramatic form. The confrontation at the gates, with its shouting, its argument between devils, and its scattering of the underworld's furniture, was among the most popular episodes in the vernacular mystery play cycles of late medieval England and the continent, where it gave the stage carpenters an excuse for a hell mouth with hinges that could visibly be broken. Later Western theology grew more cautious about the imagery and tended to restate it as a doctrine about the completeness of the descent into death rather than as an event with a plot, but the image had already fixed itself in art, drama and popular speech, where the phrase about harrowing hell long outlived any memory of what it referred to.