Ever since seeing Hell House, I’ve been dying to visit one. Luckily, one of my friends found out about one here in Austin, so a group of us are going tonight to get a dose of scare-tactics about the dangers of drugs, abortion and homosexuality.
I’m so excited!
I visited one once.
I’m still not sure exactly what the problem was; I’ve narrowed it down to two things:
(a) The place was so lame that even little kids wouldn’t have been frightened so much as confused by the bombardment of dogmatism, or
(b) I’m just so infused and suffused in the profane that all that concentrated holiness just seemed lame to me.
Do come back and post how your experience was, though.
And I’m jealous
I don’t think I could bear to go to one. I’d either get so mad that I’d start breaking stuff or so depressed by the patheticness of it all I’d jump off the hayrack on the way back.
Basing this on having watched the movie and being alternately angered and depressed.
I’d love to. A friend and I were joking the other night about going to one, and looking at the exhibits, and acting loudly shocked or horrified. “Oh my God! Gay people! Saints preserve us, protect me Father!” That or maybe make a remark about how much I’d enjoy a meatball sub when the abortion pictures come out.
The Hell House was pretty fun, even though it wasn’t as heavy-handed as the Hell House featured in the documentary. There wasn’t any reference to homosexuality, but it did touch on drunk driving, crappy parenting, date rape, abortion, and school shootings. It was far too loud to hear much of anything the actors said, so there was no context to the school shooting scene.
The car wreck was really well done. Two wrecked cars were set up, with actors and actresses strewn all over the scene. Over the noise, we could eventually hear one of the girls screeching “I wasn’t drinking! I wasn’t drinking!”
The next scene’s dialogue was largely drowned out by the car wreck scene in the adjoining space. There was a family in a living room, with a pissed-off yuppie-looking dad pacing back and forth with his briefcase talking on a cell phone. Unable to hear anything, I took the the details. I noticed this character, who finally got to the point and started bitching at his son to make something of himself, had a Dr. Phil magazine on the coffeetable, plus a Bible on top of the television. Not a good endorsement, there. The kid, of course, ran into the next room and hung himself.
The hell scenes at the end were really well done. We walked through a cell of tormented souls, then stood on the other sides of the bars. To our right, behind clear plastic panels, were more tormented souls. One had a Budweiser tallboy, and I leaned over to one of my friends and said “Cheap American beer makes you go to hell!”
The tormented souls ("It was just one joint!) came up to the bars, followed by a huge guy in a hairy, horned, masked Devil’s costume. In the fog that surrounded us, Satan reappeared behind us and lectured us on the hell that awaited us. We turned a corner, only to find him again, and more lecturing. El Elvis Rojo kept looking at him, so he was a special target.
On Beggar’s Night (as they call it around here, trying to distance it from Halloween both by name and by calander date) last week, a family came up to where my Hubby and I were passing out candy. It consisted of an older woman, a middle-aged woman and a child. None of them wore costumes.
They each took a handfull of candy from my bowl, and stuffed it into their bags without even a “Thank you”. As they stepped off the porch, the old woman handed me a Hell House flier which mentioned the various and sundry evils of Halloween.
I wanted to shout after her, “But you just took the devil’s candy, hypocrite!”
I hope it gets stuck in her dentures.
Were they for them or against them?
Yea
Yea
Yea
Nay
Yea
Yeah, the Devil didn’t like me too much. I couldn’t tell if some of the people in our line were truly scared, or just felt he was crowding their personal space. Fionn will attest her attitude was to the latter, but I know better 
The Devil called my dad pethetic, which I didn’t care for all too much. Actually, he called me “Pathetic, just like [my] father,” to whick all I could think was “I just talked to my dad on the phone two hours ago, and he’s doing fine, really. He’s working really hard, which is far from pathetic.” But I felt the Devil had a pretty busy night ahead of him, he didn’t need me informing him my father was still alive and well, so I just stared him down and tried not to laugh.
Overall, it wasn’t so bad. Actually, I was a little upset we didn’t get the scenes of demons tormenting the little girl dying of AIDS she contracted after being raped about how it all could have been avoided if she’d just accepted Jesus instead of that beer, but it was still fun. As Fionn said, the first scene with the car wreck was rather elaborate and impressive. These people apparently had something agains Buddwieser, which I don’t blame them…it’s really shit beer. Don’t know if it’s a damnable offense to drink it, just don’t bring it into my house.
They had a pretty cool elevator to Hell set up, too.
It was funny, because while we were waiting outside to go in, I made the comment about how this place looked more like a gymnasium than a church. While we were getting ready to go into the first scenario, Fionn pointed over the make shift wall to the score board. I had heard that they give you the option to pray with them after you go through the house, so I was thinking it would be funny if they had kept a tally, with those who stayed marked off under the HOME score, and those who left under the VISITOR section. Alas, we weren’t given that option, just given a silly make shift speech that wasn’t very good as THe Passion of the Christ was projected onto the ceiling.
After all this, we went back to our friend’s place and had a few drinks. Good times.
I visited the original Hell House in Cedar Hill, Texas two weekends ago. Aside from spending more time in line than for anything else in my entire life (2.45), it was pretty fun. The highlight (or lowlight) might have been the scene where a drunken father rapes his daughter, then kills her angry mother with a knife, is shot to death by his abused daughter, who subsequently becomes so distraught she slits her wrist and goes straight to hell*. My enjoyment was only diminished by not feeling comfortable laughing out loud during the performances.
Trust me, it was funnier than it sounds.
My girlfriend’s coming up to visit me this weekend and it sounds interesting…I was just wondering if anyone would be kind enough to give me directions to the one in Austin coming from San Antonio.
I assume they were against them.
Since the Hell Houses are put on for Halloween, I doubt that any will be open this weekend.
:smack: I didn’t know that