One of the things I liked best about the documentary Hell House was that its director didn’t have to make fun of his subjects in order for them to appear ridiculous: he just let them speak for themselves. Hell House is an annual event held by an extremist Pentecostal church in Texas. It goes a step farther than the Bible study club at my high school, which held a party at someone’s Mom’s house every Halloween in order to keep people from participating in the horrible heathen rituals usually attending the holiday. I never attended one of the parties, myself. Being the horrible heathen that I am, I preferred trick-or-treating in my younger days and working at a haunted house when I got older - which is, incidentally, the genesis of Hell House. The idea is to use the traditional haunted house bit to lure in flocks of unwary and unholy teenagers, and then scare them with scenes of the everlasting torment they have to look forward to, should they fail to accept Jesus etc etc.

The problem, of course (or at least one of them), is that the whole thing is so bumbling and clumsy that it’s not so much frightening as hilarious, if a little bit pathetic. Watching the cast of enthusiastically virginal teenagers painfully overacting the roles of Raver Date Rapist and Homosexual Man doesn’t scare the audience into a new wholesome look on life. Rather, you can’t help but feel a little sorry for these people, so blindly convinced that something like being gay can result only in AIDS and death, after which you’re apparently dragged off to a Plexiglass-sealed Inferno by a Christian Electronic DJ in bad Crow makeup and a black bathrobe. If the alternative is spending eternity with these people in Heaven (which consists entirely of silver streamers and deathbed-repenting drunk driving victims), sign me up.

The scariest thing about Hell House isn’t bad acting or the fog machine and red lights; it’s the ignorance of the organizers. During construction of the Cult Worship scene, an argument erupts over whether the spraypainted pentagram on the floor should be white or (as a real live Hell-House-visiting Warlock apparently suggested the previous year) red. When we’re shown the final product, however, it seems they had more than color confusion - the symbol that ends up painted on the black cardboard is not a pentagram, but a star of David. When the local DJ in charge of the Date Rape Rave scene is asked if he happens to know what the name of the date rape drug is, he’s stumped. After consulting his fellow Hell House participants, their collective best answer is: “It’s, like, offically and scientifically, like the police understand it as the Date Rape Drug and everything.” Apparently the flock of Trinity Church is very familiar with the symptoms of Rohypnol (”No, she wouldn’t be, like, spazzing out so much, would she?”) but has never even heard the term Roofies.