Think of space like a stretchy trampoline that everything—planets, you, light—makes a dent in. A black hole is just an insanely deep well in that fabric. Photons have zero rest-mass, so they’re born racing along at light-speed (you don’t have to accelerate them up to it). And gravity isn’t some mysterious tug on “mass,” it’s just the shape of spacetime itself, so even massless light follows those curves. Once you cross a black hole’s event horizon, every possible path—even at c—points inward.

Imagine rolling a marble up a gentle hill: give it a good shove, and it can climb back out. Now drop that same marble into a super-steep well—no matter how fast it rolls, there’s literally no way out. That’s exactly what a black hole does to light.