Bigotry and brimstone: a new documentary takes us inside Hell House, a Halloween creep show designed to scare kids away from "sins" like homosexuality.

Hell House * Directed by George Ratliff * Seventh Art Releasing

Hell is in the eye of the beholder. For some of us, hell is a place where most everybody packs a gun, where you can be put to death for crimes committed as a juvenile, where a black man can be chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged till his head falls off. It is a place where folks passionately believe that George W. is the answer. Hell is not somewhere George W. will go after he dies. Rather, it is where he and his kind are spawned.

This is not really hell, of course. It's just Texas--one of those old-time places that can produce a Pentecostal church like the one outside Dallas spotlighted in Hell House, in which a gay man expiring from AIDS complications is one of the main attractions in an annual Halloween freak show calculated to spook ripe young nonbelievers into the fold.

Combining the mobile-audience concept of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion with the fire-and-brimstone manipulation of the sleaziest tent-show preacher, the Hell House conversion mill created by Cedar Hill's Trinity Church of the Assemblies of God opens for business each October, running nightly Halloween week. The idea is rapidly becoming an evangelical franchise. When director and former journalist George Ratliff decided to go behind the scenes to film the process of mounting a performance, this particular Hell House was pulling in 12,000 paid visitors annually. And like grassroots theme parks, Hell Houses are now fanning out to hundreds of churches around the world.

Ratliff records the evolution of "Hell House X: The Walking Dead," in which a death-masked ghoul taunts a variety of sinners at their moment of gravest desperation. A woman hemorrhaging from an abortion pill hears, "That's right, Jan! You've killed your baby! You're a murderer, Jan!" A gay man gasps his final breaths in a hospital bed ("He thought his homosexual lifestyle was everything a real man could want, but now he's dying of AIDS"). Attending a rave, a girl is slipped a mickey, is date-raped, and commits suicide. Just outside the exit door, volunteers wait with application forms for church membership. Business is brisk.

Prior to the premiere, Ratliff interviews the enthusiastic participants--student actors from the Trinity Christian School, parents, ministers--and extorts standard-issue testimony about the power of prayer and Jesus. More compelling are the auditions, which play like a Pat Robertson remake of Fame, and a cluelessly funny monologue from the set designer explaining how he met his girlfriend when she played a victim of drugs at a rave. "I was the death monitor.... For a whole month I claimed her soul to hell. She died under my power. Shortly after that, we got together."

If there is anything truly controversial contained in Ratliffs poker-faced documentary, it is that he refuses to condescend or otherwise show his hand: Trinity church members can look at the film and feel as if they've been represented, even honored. There is but one reality-check moment, when a group of very articulate teenagers challenge Hell House on its gangbusters tactics. "This is why people are so turned off to the Christian religion," says one. "It's too black-and-white. There's no gray area." Ratliff quietly casts shame upon the walking dead of Trinity by allowing for gray area and trusting that his audience is keen enough to know a flimflam when it sees one.

Stuart is film critic' and senior film writer at Newsday.