"HELL HOUSE"
Plexifilm
Evangelical Christianity continues to exert an inestimably important
influence on a large percentage of the world population. To the largely
secular world of modern art and media, academia and philosophy,
Christianity became a functional nonentity the day Nietzsche declared
the death of God. However, millions of people, many in prominent
positions of power and influence, continue to confound adversity with
their faith in and insistence on the importance of the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus the Christ. A recent film that I don't need to
mention by name has once again placed the issue of faith versus
secularism at the forefront of international dialogue. There is a
tendency among the majority of postmodernist thinkers, one which I seem
unable to shake, of regarding the New Testament and the evolution of
faith in Christ with a clinical distance, something to consider with
suspicion and detachment. Having grown up in a strictly atheist family
of intellectuals, and from a very young age having become interested in
a variety of divergent religious and transgressive occult beliefs, I
have had my brain blown open and wiped clean of the possibility of
investing fully in the kind of senseless wide-eyed faith, piety and
exclusivity demanded by the born-again movement. However, whether
reading the profoundly inspiring works of Kierkegaard or Pascal, or
hearing the revenant gospel of Blind Willie Johnson or the Gnostic
poetry cycles of Current 93, I cannot help but feel a strange
gravitational pull towards the faith of Paul, and George Ratliff's
documentary Hell House
is a perfect encapsulation of the enticing beauty of modern
Christianity. Ratliff trains his camera on Trinity Church, a large
Midwestern Pentacostal community that has devised a unique method of
convincing new members to join the faith. Each year at Halloween, they
erect an enormous haunted house, a series of rooms through which
visitors are ushered, each room vividly exhibiting a different
temptation of the modern world and its disastrous effect on the
spiritual life of its victims. Truly frightening one-act plays about
such taboo subjects as abortion, homosexuality, family violence, drug
addiction and occultism are enacted by a spirited group of young
born-agains. A variety of high-tech audio effects, pyrotechnics and
even live gunfire are utilized to make each vignette as confrontational
and frightening as possible, culminating in a nightmarish vision of
hell complete with the souls of the eternally damned writhing in
plexiglass cages, screaming penances on the deaf ears of grinning
devils. At the end of each Hell House tour, the audience members are
given the chance to redeem themselves and become born-again, signing
promissory contracts and praying to have their sins absolved in the
blood of Christ. The Hell House attracts tens of thousands of visitors
each year, and a staggeringly large percentage of the visitors are
convinced to take the vow of faith. The passion and work ethic applied
to the planning and implementation of the Hell House is the chief
subject of the film, and it provides fascinating insight. Ratliff's
non-judgmental lens is startlingly objective in its view of
middle-American Christians young and old, providing a view of modern
religious faith that avoids the "Jesus Freak" cliches I'd become
accustomed to. There are dozens of haunting scenes that have etched
themselves into my memory, chief among them a sequence showing a
typical church gathering, where the Pentacostals speak to God in their
"love language" — a string of nonsensical tongues and glossolalia that
serves to transcend reason and appeal directly to the spirit. An
appropriately ghostly musical score is provided by Matt and Bubba
Kadane. Hell House is beautifully and respectfully rendered
portrait of a silent majority; the triumphs of modern Christianity have
never been so vividly depicted.
Evangelical Christianity continues to exert an inestimably important
influence on a large percentage of the world population. To the largely
secular world of modern art and media, academia and philosophy,
Christianity became a functional nonentity the day Nietzsche declared
the death of God. However, millions of people, many in prominent
positions of power and influence, continue to confound adversity with
their faith in and insistence on the importance of the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus the Christ. A recent film that I don't need to
mention by name has once again placed the issue of faith versus
secularism at the forefront of international dialogue. There is a
tendency among the majority of postmodernist thinkers, one which I seem
unable to shake, of regarding the New Testament and the evolution of
faith in Christ with a clinical distance, something to consider with
suspicion and detachment. Having grown up in a strictly atheist family
of intellectuals, and from a very young age having become interested in
a variety of divergent religious and transgressive occult beliefs, I
have had my brain blown open and wiped clean of the possibility of
investing fully in the kind of senseless wide-eyed faith, piety and
exclusivity demanded by the born-again movement. However, whether
reading the profoundly inspiring works of Kierkegaard or Pascal, or
hearing the revenant gospel of Blind Willie Johnson or the Gnostic
poetry cycles of Current 93, I cannot help but feel a strange
gravitational pull towards the faith of Paul, and George Ratliff's
documentary Hell House
is a perfect encapsulation of the enticing beauty of modern
Christianity. Ratliff trains his camera on Trinity Church, a large
Midwestern Pentacostal community that has devised a unique method of
convincing new members to join the faith. Each year at Halloween, they
erect an enormous haunted house, a series of rooms through which
visitors are ushered, each room vividly exhibiting a different
temptation of the modern world and its disastrous effect on the
spiritual life of its victims. Truly frightening one-act plays about
such taboo subjects as abortion, homosexuality, family violence, drug
addiction and occultism are enacted by a spirited group of young
born-agains. A variety of high-tech audio effects, pyrotechnics and
even live gunfire are utilized to make each vignette as confrontational
and frightening as possible, culminating in a nightmarish vision of
hell complete with the souls of the eternally damned writhing in
plexiglass cages, screaming penances on the deaf ears of grinning
devils. At the end of each Hell House tour, the audience members are
given the chance to redeem themselves and become born-again, signing
promissory contracts and praying to have their sins absolved in the
blood of Christ. The Hell House attracts tens of thousands of visitors
each year, and a staggeringly large percentage of the visitors are
convinced to take the vow of faith. The passion and work ethic applied
to the planning and implementation of the Hell House is the chief
subject of the film, and it provides fascinating insight. Ratliff's
non-judgmental lens is startlingly objective in its view of
middle-American Christians young and old, providing a view of modern
religious faith that avoids the "Jesus Freak" cliches I'd become
accustomed to. There are dozens of haunting scenes that have etched
themselves into my memory, chief among them a sequence showing a
typical church gathering, where the Pentacostals speak to God in their
"love language" — a string of nonsensical tongues and glossolalia that
serves to transcend reason and appeal directly to the spirit. An
appropriately ghostly musical score is provided by Matt and Bubba
Kadane. Hell House is beautifully and respectfully rendered
portrait of a silent majority; the triumphs of modern Christianity have
never been so vividly depicted.
