The fundamentalist horrors of HELL HOUSE

This year, thousands of Halloween revelers all over the USA visited what they thought were ordinary haunted house attractions, only to discover that the spook show was something very different from what they expected. Instead of vampires and werewolves, the shows featured the "evils" of abortion and homosexuality, with increasingly nasty and bloody scenes designed to scare "sinners" into repenting.

George Ratliff's documentary Hell House looks at the strange and creepy evangelical Christian haunted houses that have sprung up like mushrooms around the nation. Kids go into what they think are normal haunted house attractions, and are confronted with botched abortions, domestic violence, school shooting re-enactments and people in devil costumes shouting lies at them. The film plays like a vicious satire of fundamentalist intolerance, but it's all real. Now that's terrifying.



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