Members of the Metroplex Atheists (Brian McIntosh, David Penn, and John Hattan) along with Texas American Atheists State Director Shelly Hattan attended a local Dallas-Ft. Worth Hell House on Friday night, October 27. We did not receive a jerky, home video of Shelly declaring "I'm so scared!" but here are some of the highlights from their trek into the fantasy world of Christian horror.

hile waiting in line for the hay ride out to the Hell House, several women who had been the year before proclaimed that they liked to come to this haunted house because it's "real" and it's "like going to church." The target audience of the Hell House was definitely early teens. We felt terribly old. The nature of the house was pushed from the beginning. At the ticket office a yellow sign stated, "Warning! By voluntarily going through Hell House X you will see. . . Live Gunfire, Suicide, Blood, Strobes, Drug Usage, Death & Hell!! Anyone afraid of the dark, or enclosed areas should notify the Tour Guide BEFORE their tour. Enter at your own risk."

   Tiki torches were also abundant. Satan apparently shops at Pier-1.

   The Hell House was a series of different rooms, spread out over three gutted doublewide trailers, that showed a five-minute "plays." A high schooler dressed in black with a full-faced rubber demon mask guided us through.

   The first play was about a high school boy who was abused by his father. There was some "evil" music played very loudly. Surprisingly, the Christian kids knew the words, which I don't think was the organizers' intent. In the skit, the boy argued with his sister, and in the next scene he was picked on by the students and the teacher. He was also being influenced by a demon whispering into his ear (another kid in a black robe with a rubber mask). The boy ended up pulling out a gun in a classroom and killing himself in front of the class. All of the shocks in this skit were basically from loud noise -- nobody performed their part in a volume level below a shout.

   A boy was in an emergency room on a gurney with his sister by his side and the theme to the TV show "E.R." playing in the background. The boy apparently had caught AIDS from his male lover. He refused to accept Christ into his life before he died. On the other side of the ER room was a girl suffering from an abortion gone wrong. The girl blamed her predicament on taking RU-486. She had blood everywhere and screamed "I KILLED MY BABY" several times. She cried out for Christ before she died, so she was able to go to heaven, escorted away by a kid in an angel costume.

   A girl who went to a Rave took some drugs offered to her by a partygoer. One of the drugs given her was the date rape drug and she was multiply raped, tastefully obscured by water-vapor smoke.

   Inexplicably, there was a large plastic light-up snowman in the middle of the party. Nobody seemed to question it, so we assumed that misplaced Christmas decorations are just a rave thing.

   The next scene showed the girl in her room, being goaded into an intravenous drug overdose by a leering demon. She made a point of cursing Jesus before shooting up, so you can guess where she went.

   A boy and a girl were waiting for a buyer for their cocaine and were robbed. The girl was shot with a real gun (containing blanks), showing once again that loud equals scary. A rival drug dealer shoved the boy's face in his own stash, ensuring a quieter end for him than his girlfriend.

   Unfortunately, the mood of this skit was broken by the fact that the hay that lined the floor was apparently harvested from a horse farm, and it was still a bit ripe. I never realized that crackhouses looked and smelled so much like stables.

   The next scene was one with a girl who had had a life long interest in the occult (examples used: Ouija board and reading Harry Potter books). She was lured to a Satanic ritual by a friend and was going to be (surprise!) sacrificed. She caught on in a hurry, but was held down by dark forces. Being a quick thinker, she called on Jesus and was able to escape. Her companion who lured her to the ritual was sacrificed in her place.

   This particular skit was just odd. I can understand teens having to face school violence, drugs, and abortion, but human sacrifice? I guess I must've missed the day that Nancy Reagan warned about that one.

   Three kids were in a very wrecked car (in a rare piece of actual production value, they had an actual wrecked car). The driver sprawled on the hood was the driver who rose up as we entered. A policeman was calling for an ambulance, but called it off when he saw that all three kids were dead. The boy was the brother and had been drinking before driving, and he had killed himself and his two sisters.

   Turns out one of the sisters went to church. When the brother and other sister asked her what was going to happen, she told them that it was time for judgment. An angel came for the Christian sister. The others tried to go with her but the angel told them they couldn't go. The Christian sister, unfazed by the idea of her siblings facing eternal torture, simply waved bye to her brother and sister and wandered out with the angel.

   This was the final skit. A large meaty tattooed dad was sitting on a couch strewn with empty beer cans. His daughter was nearby, surfing the internet, presumably with dad's supervision. Suddenly she screamed out, "Oh, my God!", and her father obviously wanted to know what was up. Turns out, Mom had been having an on-line affair and had made plans to rendezvous with her lover that night. Mom showed up briefly, but fled to her chatroom lover when she saw that her drunken, but faithful, hubby had found out.

   The second part occurred at "Jimmy's" place. Mom and Jimmy finally met and had a brief rendezvous, but Dad was apparently quite the hacker and found 'em. He clobbered Jimmy to death (poor guy didn't even know mom was married) and choked mom.

   This was the strangest part of the whole event. We were ushered into a room with a large projection screen. Lofty music was played along with a montage of several Jesus movies (the actor playing Jesus kept playing). Inexplicably, they also played clips of Mel Gibson from "Braveheart." Several times we looked at each other, trying to figure out exactly how his character fit in with Jesus. All we could figure was that he, like Jesus in the movies, had long hair.

   This part of Hell House was dubbed and the actors (not the same ones from the skits) lip-synched the words. The car-wreck girl was admitted into heaven, which very closely resembled a giant tanning booth. The other doomed souls, including AIDS-man, rave-girl, and strangled mom, were taken elsewhere by the obligatory rubber-faced demons.

   We were then crammed into "coffins," which were small closets with coffin-shaped doors. John remarked later that being locked into a closet with three prepubescent girls was wrong on several levels. The coffins had a canned message piped into them telling us what was in store if we didn't accept Jesus in our lives. The coffins opened on the other side, and we were admitted into Hell. In hell, we got to see all the doomed souls from the previous skits, nailing that point home for the third time. Unfortunately, the people playing the parts weren't the same as the ones in the original plays or even in the previous bits. They didn't even try to get the people to look the same, which just made the entire thing confusing. Here we found that hell isn't really scary, just rather annoying. It's got lots of loose floorboards that make you stumble around a lot, and Satan's just another guy in a rubber mask. Lots of moaning and groaning, of course. Pretty tame stuff.

   Finally, we were ushered into a room with two men. The first man, well-versed in preaching and car-sales, gave us a hard-sell on how what we had just seen was real. He was very intense and made eye contact with people, mostly the small kids in front of the grownups, on an aggressive individual basis. He finally asked the people who were "ready" to go through the exit-door for prayer with the waiting prayer-partners. For the people who stayed behind (about half of us), the guy did another pitch for getting saved. He made it clear that the only reason we were still in the room was if we just wanted out or if we weren't saved by what we saw. He was a master of high pressure. He finally let us leave through the same door.

   We waded through the group of prayer-partners. Everyone who prayed got a free mint. Brian McIntosh reached over and took a mint for himself without praying, but nobody stopped him from doing it.

   All in all, this was a truly mediocre experience. The production values were poor given that it was the same price as other local haunted houses. It was scary if you consider doublewide trailers, loud noises, and about a square mile of black sheet-plastic to be scary. It was very sad to see the kids buying into all this nonsense and thinking it's real.

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