“What you’re about to see is a reality check . . . a warning of the coming danger of what our culture is facing.”
So what are we facing, exactly? Drug overdoses (boo), drunk driving (ugh), homosexuality (Yay!), domestic violence (no), incest (nope), abortion (it’s a choice), human sacrifice (Woo hoo!), and some amateur wrestling that includes a folding chair (absolutely, yes). We will also face guns, Magic: The Gathering, white people singing, white people talking in tongues, and of course, white people throwing their hands in the air and waving like they just don’t care. We will also face a rave that involves date-rape and a suicide. Also a DJ and black lights because we definitely need to amp up the drama there.
All this to say that the “presence of the devil is very real.”
Hell House is a documentary that follows zealous Christians from Trinity Church as they put on a haunted house featuring reenactments of exploitative violence: gang members have a fatal shootout, a young teen drinks and gets behind the wheel, a father learns his wife is having an affair and goes off. There’s a particularly chilling recreation of a classroom shooting, which shows how far we haven’t come since 2001 when this documentary was released. (Earlier, the same church put on a Hell House with a recreation of the Columbine tragedy, a fact that made me, a person who has seen a lifetime of disembowelment on screen, clutch my pearls.) Then there are the reenactments around biblical sins: A young man dies of AIDS because he didn’t pray the gay away, and a young woman decides to end her pregnancy, which of course ends her life. You can’t help but roll your eyes and you also can’t help to gawk because it’s so over the top and extreme. I mean, extreme violence in fiction films is one thing, but having extreme ideas around morality is a totally different kind of violence. Every single scene depicted in the Hell House has drama, intrigue, gore, melodrama, and our friend Satan. Honestly if actual church services included a haunted house, I’d probably be a pastor right now. Turns out the greatest haunted house isn’t in Universal Studios Hollywood; it’s in Cedar Park, Texas.
Of course, whenever you get a group of religious zealots together, you can’t help but see their hypocrisy. One particular participant knows a little too much about how the date-rape drug affects victims. But you also see why these folks might’ve turned to religion in the first place: a single father struggles as he raises four children, including one with cerebral palsy. He prays for a seizure to stop, and it does. These folks truly believe they are trying to save lost souls, but as we all know, some souls don’t need saving and we just want to live our goddamn lives.
Many years ago, a group of exquisite humans ordered a genuine Hell House manual and staged one at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. They followed the instructions to the letter, staying faithful to the script and scenes. I attended and it’s a memory I will cherish forever. There was fire! Brimstone! Assisted suicide! Whatever you have in your mind about a Hell House, I can tell you, it’s actually even more extreme and wonderful in real life. Then at the end of the walk through, there was a lecture where someone demanded I let Jesus into my heart, and for a second there, I almost did. Hail, Satan.
