Firm Films has picked up the rights to make a film based on the Hell House Outreach. The staged haunted house-like attraction, created by pastor Keenan Roberts, runs through Halloween and its exhibits preach the fire and brimstone conservative values of the evangelical church.
The first hell house may have been created by Jerry Falwell in the late 1970s. Similar events began in several regions during that period. More recently, the concept has been promoted by Pastor Keenan Roberts, originally of Roswell, New Mexico, who started a well-known hell house there in 1992. Since that time, hell houses have become a regular fixture of the Halloween season. Pastor Roberts remains active in what he calls his hell house ministry by providing kits and directions to enable churches to perform their own attractions. He is now the senior pastor of Destiny Church Of The Assemblies Of God where Hell House is still performed each year in the month of October.
A “demon tour guide” escorts groups through a series of rooms, each populated by performers who enact shortcuts to hell. These include a woman having an abortion, two men marrying, a teen overdosing on Ecstasy at a rave and a date rape by a star jock. The finale shows Jesus leading the tour in a prayer for salvation.
The film will center on a Christian group who plans its first Hell House Outreach performance, and how an entire town is impacted as pro-choice and gay-rights groups protest perfs they feel are exclusionary and hateful.
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