Hell House - Rightwing Cultic Brainwashing for Hallow'een

This from The Independent - read it before it disappears behind the pay-per-view wall.

And remember, these evil fuckers are the folks who support Alito the most:

It's called Hell House, which sounds ordinary enough. What makes it peculiar is that it is run by a right-wing evangelical church, and its aim is, quite literally, to scare the bejesus out of impressionable teenagers and shock them into signing up for a life in the service of Christ.

We've already endured scenes of assault, abortion, murder and suicide, complete with ear-piercing gunfire, strobe lights, thumpingly loud music and buckets of theatrical blood. We've seen a teenage girl punished for entertaining a single brief thought about meeting a guy on spring break - a thought that leads directly to her being viciously gang-raped. We've seen how homosexual temptation can lead to lies, betrayal and violent death. We've seen people become evil under the influence of pornography.

And now we are plunged into sudden darkness. Out of no-where, actors in devil costumes grab us by the shoulders and throw us into upright coffins. The doors slam shut and won't open. Someone is cowering next to me in my coffin, but it's too dark to see who it is. The heavy-metal soundtrack is cranked up to maximum volume, the devils start beating the coffins with sticks and laugh manically that we are on the way to eternal damnation.

Some of my fellow Hell Housers lose it completely. "Get me out of here! Get me out of here!" screams a girl a couple of coffins down.

This is evil, nasty sicko-cult brainwashing at its very worst.

Things started getting particularly gruesome, in a Hammer horror sort of way, in the abortion scene, when cold, heartless doctor characters used an outsize pair of tweezers to pull unidentified bloody animal parts out from between a teenage girl's legs. (This trick, incidentally, is straight out of Keenan Roberts' outreach kit.) Having extracted the foetus - "America's version of the Holocaust," the devil narrators tell us - the doctors then manage to let the girl die too, through inattention. They act like it's just another day at the office.

In the show's most overwrought scene, an alcoholic, adulterous, porn-addicted litigation lawyer who has just secured freedom for a known paedophile stabs his wife rather than have her discover he has been molesting their daughter. The daughter then shoots her father, retreats to her room and slits her wrists, spilling fake blood over the floor, next to her bible.

To take 13 and 14 year olds, already awash with hormones, and subject them to the kind of flood of neurochemicals this would induce would produce a tabula rasa - an almost clean slate upon which anything could be written. Its a process well understood by psychologists and unscrupulous cults. Its also almost certainly assault, even if the people went there voluntarily, and it should be something for which a rape charge would be made in court. Does any police department or prosecutor have the guts to shut places like this down?

There - that's a real Hallow'een horror story for you. Blessed be.