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The recent success of Michael Moore's Academy Award-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine bodes well for other documentary filmmakers wanting to bring controversial issues to the movie-watching public. Just  watch some recent documentaries like The Trials of Henry Kissinger or Los Trabajadores  if you don't believe me. 

Recently released on video and DVD, Hell House, directed by George Ratliff, is among the best documentaries released in the past year. Hell House is not a horror movie in the traditional sense, rather, it concerns the pastor and congregants of the fundamentalist Trinity Christian Church in Cedar Hill, Texas, just south of Dallas. 

For the past decade during the month of October, Trinity has put on Hell House, a popular and controversial spook house and Halloween alternative that tries to convert the lost by scaring them straight - literally. 

I say that because in a portion of the film, Ratliff shows Hell House visitors witnessing a man named Steve who is shown lying in a hospital bed, dying from AIDS. The Trinity crew hopes visitors see that engaging in "the homosexual lifestyle" is a one-way ticket to the pits of hell and that if they are gay they had better change their ways or they'll end up like Steve. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Ratliff, a native of Amarillo, Texas, presents Hell House in a nonjudgmental fashion. That is to his credit and serves the film well. 

Ratliff's goal is to simply show members of an Assemblies of God church (along with the students of the adjacent Trinity Christian Academy) engaging in an annual pastime that is congruent to their religious beliefs. For Trinity, where speaking in tongues is routine, Hell, with manipulative devils and all, is a very real place. 

Ratliff does a great job covering the weeks of hard work that are spent preparing for the opening of Hell House. Scrubbed, suburban teenagers, and adults audition for parts, build elaborate sets, and introduce newer and scarier scenes in hopes that the heathen who pass through Hell House will be frightened into giving their souls over to Jesus. 

This attempt to manipulate the masses through fear is done in various ways. 

In one segment of the Hell House, a teenaged boy is egged on by ghoulish demons to kill himself after being relentlessly teased in school. After he commits suicide by shooting himself in front of his stunned class, the dime store demons drag his soul down into the lake of fire. 

Another disturbing and graphic segment shows a woman who has a botched abortion and a girl who commits suicide after being raped at a rave and remembering that she had been molested as a child. 

What Ratliff shows is the zealous and fundamentalist side of middle-American Christianity. In essence he is reinforcing the view among the coastal elite that "flyover country" is full of cornfed rubes that believe in fire-and-brimstone and that fear of Hell will eventually lead you to salvation. Trinity's pastor and members make no apologies for their tactics. I'm not saying everyone at Trinity is like that. In fact, I had a very close friend who graduated from Trinity's school and she was certainly balanced and thoughtful. I can say the same for Ratliff, whose Texas upbringing and understanding of religious life in the South, serves him well and results in a balanced and thoughtful documentary. 

I guess what disturbed me most was the enthusiasm with which the Trinity folks portrayed each hellish situation. I guess playing the bad guy is much more fun than acting the angel. 

I think in Hell House that both Ratliff and Trinity Church successfully achieved their goals. 

Andrew West Griffin  12/16/03