Customer Reviews

Hell House

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an admirably objective and well-made film, which chronicles the production of an evangelical Christian church's Halloween Hell House, an annual attraction that attempts to win souls for the church by trying to scare people with silly and misinformed portrayals of the horrors of secular life. In their attempt to construct an "occult" scene, church members actually paint a Star of David on the floor because they have no idea what a pentagram looks like, and they base their color scheme on the advice of a "warlock" who came to the Hell House some years before. No pagan or witch calls himself a warlock unless he's gotten all his information on the topic from watching "Charmed," which these churchgoers would know if they bothered to put any effort into research at all. Ignorance abounds here, from the cretinous portrayal of homosexuality as a result of childhood sexual abuse to the epic misrepresentation of the abortion pill RU-486. Throughout each revolting little playlet, the cardboard characters are taunted by a cackling Satan character who makes it sound like they deserve what they're getting and wouldn't be suffering if they'd had the correct beliefs. One gets the feeling that this church is pleased as punch to see them go to hell, and the Satan character conveys this with real glee. This kind of nastiness and cynicism has no place in a religion supposedly built on love. I was glad to see scenes of audience members giggling at all the hoary amateur dramatics, but the awful thing is that Hell Houses across the country do win converts through these showcases of bigotry and delusion. Maybe somebody should put on a Fundamentalism House. Now that would be scary.

I spent ten years working various scenes at the Trinity Church Hellhouse. Yes, it is a bit campy, and yes, it is often over the top, but I can say that the people are well intentioned, just a bit off target. I attended Trinity Church from birth until I was 22 years old. I do not attend their anymore because of the close-minded attitude that is prevalant in this documentary. I stopped doing HellHouse when they added the decision room my last year. I just felt it was an un-biblical scare tactic. I now feel that way about the entire operation. The worst feeling I get is knowing the young teenagers are blindly following the leadership without doing any research themselves. I know because I was once one of them. I have found that a growing number of former Trinity Youth Group members my age do not attend there for the same reasons I listed above. This movie will open your eyes to the way teens are herded like cattle in fundamentalist Christian Churches.

I grew up in an evangelical church where scare tactics and repeated warnings that Jesus' return was imminent were used to keep you on the straight and narrow path.

I thought the scene where the leader confronts a group of offended teenagers who obviously didn't appreciate that rather black and white portrayal of life, and made no bones about it. As much as I agree with a theology that places Jesus at the center of life, I found myself agreeing more with those that took offense than to the leadership of this church that doesn't seem to realize what the implications of what they're doing really are.

I wonder how the members of this group would feel if there was a similar house set up that portrayed the worst aspects of church life and scared people away from every coming to church. How about a room where a Sunday school teacher is found out for cheating on his wife, or an authoritarian pastor steamrolls over the life of one of his parishioners or misappropriates church funds? How about seeing the fallout that comes after one of these Pentecostal-type pastors intimates that he knows the date of the Second Coming? How about a room where a priest is buggering an altar boy? I wonder what the reaction to that would be?

I really wonder sometimes if God appreciates his calling card being offered in the guise of fearmongering and extremism. I can think of nothing better than people having God encounters; but I am thinking that if the impulse is fear and not love, then the encounter is dimmed if not tarnished altogether. My gut feeling is that people who get scared into the kingdom are spiritual parapalegics; yes, they are in the door but they are forced to get around in wheelchairs.

Jesus... save us from your followers...

This is a fascinating look at the evangelical world of black and white, good and evil. With no tolerance, or room for ambiguity in their thoughts, the "folks" at Trinity Church explain all the of life's complexities with one simple creed, it's the work of the devil. One simple-minded soul explains, "this is the worst the world has ever been." Apparently the poor dear has never heard of the plague, witch trials, or other tortured times when the religion ruled the world. I suppose they didn't teach those things at the Trinity school. The most frightening part of this documentary is when young children, after being subjected to scenes that relentlessly hammer them with violent images, are psychologically coerced into going through a door "where there are people waiting to pray with you", or re-enter the secular world and risk damnation. As a psychotherapist, (another thing that evangelicals believe are of the devil) I can now fully understand why the majority of my most impaired clients come from fundamentalist backgrounds. Allowing young children to go through a Hell House is nothing short of child abuse, and at the very least Christian extortion.

Hell House (George Ratliff, 2001)

Hell House is a documentary, a quick look at the infamous haunted house run every October by a Pentecostal church in Texas. One gets the distinct feeling that the church members had no idea Ratliff was making this documentary to poke fun at them, as earnest as they are.

The best scenes in this are those where Ratliff is using wordless, lingering shots to show how little these people actually know about what they're doing. The funniest thing in the whole movie is one church member describing the "occult" scene, which uses a pentagram; actually, it's not a pentagram, it's a Star of David in a circle. (It continues to amaze me no one there, seemingly, knows how to count to five.) Moments like this happen with regularity in the film, if you're paying close enough attention. Most of them are more subtle, but the payoff is just as grand.

For those of you unfamiliar with the increasingly-popular Hell Houses, a quick rundown: a Hell House is a Christian "haunted house"-type Halloween attraction put on for the purpose of converting the heathen. Everything from the amusing (raves, satanic sacrifice) to the boring (kid commits suicide because his peers are picking on him) to the morally repugnant (at this congregation, at least, AIDS is still strictly a "gay disease") is depicted in an attempt to scare the heathen straight and get them to convert. Does it work? This documentary would lead you to believe not, despite the claims of one church member that a number of people converted that month. (Entirely possible; Ratliff couldn't film all the groups being ministered to, of course, and the church (backed up by news reports) claims three thousand coming through per day. Like the old mama said, if you throw enough spaghetti against a wall...

Best watched for the amusement factor, but prepare to be horrified as well. Yes, folks, people still think like Neanderthals in 2001. ****

George Ratliff has made a gem of documentary in "Hell House." He exposes the scary ignorance of fundamentalist Christians by letting them speak for themselves, while at the same time showing their humanity and that, however misguided, they do care about their fellow human beings and want to save them. The only objection I could offer is that from what appears in the documentary, the only critics of the Hell House are incoherent raging teenagers, whose objections are skillfully and calmly responded to by a member of the church. Yet I know from first-hand knowledge that there are critics of fundamentalism (Christian and otherwise) who are capably of equally calm and skilled rational debate. Perhaps they just aren't found in that part of Texas...

HELL HOUSE is one of the most frightening movies you could ever see, because it proves beyond any doubt that the most serious threat to America and the American way of life are religious fundamentalists. The filmmakers give their subjects enough rope to not only hang themselves, but to hang the entire religious right in the process. Truly disturbing, and well worth watching.

George Carlin got it right when he described America as a great country with a strange culture. The peculiar form of "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition" Christianity that exists in this country has done its part to contribute to the weird underbelly of the American cultural landscape -- from Jack Chick's Christian comic tracts to snake-handling congregations to the subject of the documentary "Hell House."

Each year, Trinity Assembly of God Church in Cedar Hill, Texas, puts on "Hell House," a Halloween attraction intended to scare people onto the straight and narrow. George Ratliff's documentary follows the young church members who form the cast and crew through early script meetings, auditions and scenery building to their performances on opening night.

Like similar attractions at churches around the country, "Hell House" contains the usual scenes -- a girl bleeding to death after taking the abortion pill, a homosexual AIDS sufferer angrily denouncing God, a boy who shoots himself in front of his class. Throughout the documentary, Ratliff neither condones nor mocks the congregation's beliefs, allowing viewers to make their own judgements.

The church members seem like decent-enough people, but what is most frightening about them is they are blissfully unaware of their own ignorance. They purport to show, through "Hell House," the reality of things like rave parties or occult ceremonies, but it's glaringly obvious how little they know about what they're portraying. Even the church member who claims he regularly attended raves before accepting Jesus does not know the name of the common date-rape drug slipped to an unsuspecting young woman in the "Hell House" rave scene.

Other examples: The narrator in the occult scene blames "Goosebumps" and "Harry Potter" books for leading children down the road to Satanism. A church member painting a "pentagram" on the floor while building scenery actually draws a Star of David in a circle. In "hell", the actor portraying a dammed homosexual writhes in agony while crying out, "When I was little my uncle used to do things to me. He convinced me I was born this way."

Members of the youth group offer simple, cut-and-dried solutions to complex problems. The young lady who plays "abortion girl" blames Satan's influence for her mother's Internet affair and estrangement from the family. A father exclaims, "Oh God," when his disabled son has a seizure, then credits his "calling on God" for the boy's quick recovery. Church members state the world is worse than it has ever been, a sure sign of the End Times.

Before opening night, church members gather to ask God's blessing on their enterprise in a prayer meeting that ends with weeping and "speaking in tongues" -- inane babble that sounds more like something that would issue from the mouth of Beelzebub. "Religion is the opiate of the masses?" One is inclined to believe so after seeing such religious mass hysteria.

This is an extremely disturbing but essential movie for any free-thinker or anyone who is disturbed by the current religious right wing. A "hell house" is an extremely clever form of brainwashing teens and stifling dissent. The documentary carefully focusses on how a real horror show is created for Halloween but unlike the usual scary and mindless fun is a full blown sermon that disguises itself as entertainment. The most frightening part of the whole concept of the "Hellhouse" is the hatred behind it. The scenario where a teenager is dying of AIDS and another is dying from taking RU-486 while someone dressed as the devil is laughing is sickening as is the re-enaction of Columbine where the teen character being mocked and obviously losing it is portrayed as "succumbing to Satan". Some parts of this movie are amusing, in a John Waters-ish kind of way. If these people weren't deadly serious about this quasi-indoctrination, I could pass it off as a laugh. And the kids who interrupt them and demanding answers are not "ranters". They chose to spoke out. So should anyone who, like the film makers (who let the people speak for themselves, rather than commenting on their own) believes that our young people have the right to make up their own mind about their sexuality, have the right to choose and seek treatment for their mental health issues, rather than believing that they are "living a life of sin".

I found this documenary downright fascinating and the only reason why I didn't give it five stars is because there's a limit to how highly I'll rate a documentary that falls into the "edited together raw footage" category.

However, this was done about as well as I could have ever expected. The footage was edited together skillfully in a way that told the story of one group of Christians in a church out there in the Bible best desperately trying to warn young adults about the consequences of certain decisions.

I appreciated the fact that, unlike "Jesus Camp", the footage wasn't accompanied by weird ominous music in an attempt to make the viewer think that these people are just a bunch of wingnuts. If you as a viewer want to think that, fine, but it won't be because you were manipulated into thinking that.

In fact, this docmentary let the subjects tell their own story. These are real people on a mission to help others. One may question their tactics, but I won't question their sincerety or their ability to organize and work as a team. And, a few of them are really quite good actors too!