Review of Hell House (2001) by David B — 06 Aug 2009

"Hell House" is a documentary in the vein of Mike Papantonio's 2006 "Jesus Camp", with a very similar subject, style and message. The subject is the preparation of Trinity school's tenth "Hell House" show, from casting and rehearsals to opening night. The style is one of affected sympathetic neutrality, letting the people involved explain themselves. And the message is: "My God these people are dangerous nutters, what are we enlightened liberals going to do about them?".

The "Hell House" concept is a kind of school play version of an Ignatian retreat. I remember browsing through a copy of St Ignatius's exercises when I was a teen and reading the one about picturing the torments of Hell. To me that was really quaint and grotesque stuff. I was a twentieth century kid, and I was glad we'd grown past such "medieval" superstitions and moved on to watching porn and listening to the Sex Pistols. But now that I'm a Catholic convert, of course, I swallow the Church doctrine about Hell hook, line and sinker. If Jesus says there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, then it's enough for me. That's how uncritical I've become.

I even went through a rather stern, five-day Ignatian retreat in 2004, and the meditation about Hell was perhaps the closest thing I have ever had to a mystical experience, though I would rather call it a profound insight into something I had never really thought about. It involved realising what the eternity of Hell meant: it meant still being there eons after the heat-death of the universe, eons after all the protons had decayed, eons after Judgment Day and the folding of the current order of things. And that was not a plesant prospect.

Of course, as a Catholic, I do not recognise myself in the Pentecostals portrayed in the film. I don't like their theatrical approach to religion, the gesticulating, the grimacing, the deliberate arousal of intense emotions, the constant psychodrama, the touching during prayers, and of course, the rock'n roll services and the speaking in tongues. I also disagree with them on many doctrinal points, such as their belief in a newfangled "rapture", their idea that they constitute "the church", and their probable support of Creationism (not mentioned in the film.).

But I could empathise with these people and their desire to exorcise their own encounters with the depravity of the modern world through small dramatised scenes about domestic violence, suicide, abortion, date rape, alcohol, drugs and high school massacres. Sometimes they didn't seem really to know what they were talking about (they got the pentacle confused with the star of David, and they didn't seem to have problems with "Magic: The Gathering".) But sometimes, they knew firsthand: one girl had been raped, one man was abandoned by his wife for an Internet encounter, and another came directly from the rave scene.

It was nice also to learn that they were aware of the limitations of what they were doing, and that "make-up, corny lines and soundtrack can only go so far." And however weird, wrong and overexcited I find Pentecostals (and charismatics in general, including Catholic ones) to be, I felt I was much more on their side than on those of the cursing punks who recited the relativistic dogmas they'd been taught in school and used arguments like "I have gay friends... what's wrong with being gay?" (I'm sure rapists are friends too; this is completely irrelevant.).

If you don't believe in Hell, this film will not convince you of its existence; it's not even meant to: it's meant to comfort you in that disbelief (sometimes I think that's what Pentecostals are for: to make it easier to disparage Christianity.) Anyway, if you don't believe in Hell, you probably don't believe in anything much, and Hell is not the place to start (I started with a rather simple argument for the existence of God, which is pure logic and metaphysics, and then built up chaotically from there for about four years of reading before I was fully converted.) But since the documentary was made by an unbeliever, you should find much in it to your liking, and much to bolster your belief that you are so intellectually superior to the ignorant fools like the Pentecostals and me who still believe in eternal damnation.