Haunted Hollywood
Bill Maher goes to hell.

BY CATHERINE SEIPP
September 3, 2004

A popular talking point now, among those who dread the president's re-election, is that the Christian Right in George W. Bush's America is at least as dangerous as international Islamic radicals. Never mind that the latter are rather more prone to violence than the former. What's really frightening, the conventional wisdom goes, is the crudely intolerant agenda of Christian fundamentalists.

The latest (unintentional) object lesson that this is nonsense comes courtesy of the "Hollywood Hell House," a walk-through theatrical satire that opened last week in Los Angeles. Its target is those church-sponsored, evangelical "haunted" houses--part of the Halloween season--that warn teens about the perils of Satan-worship, gay sex and the "convenient choice" (as the demon tour guide puts it) of abortion.

"Hollywood Hell House," which opened Aug. 28 and stars Bill Maher as Satan, Andy Richter as Jesus and a rotating cast of other celebrity comics, is based on the Hell House Outreach kits sold by Keenan Roberts, an Assemblies of God minister in suburban Denver. Religious haunted houses have been around since at least the early 1970s. But Mr. Roberts's version, which he first staged 10 years ago, has proved especially popular: Church groups have produced it some 3,000 times, in most states and more than a dozen countries."Hollywood Hell House" sold out opening night and runs through Halloween at the Center for Inquiry-West, a self-described "secular humanist community organization" on Hollywood Boulevard. It's a funny idea and cleverly executed under the direction of Jill Soloway, a writer for HBO's "Six Feet Under." Her co-director, actress/writer Maggie Rowe, obtained the Hell House kit under not entirely truthful pretenses: She told Mr. Roberts that she was the director of a West Hollywood youth group--accurate only in that she named her production company The Youth Group.

Mr. Roberts was a little miffed when he found out. "I said, 'You should have had more character and integrity,'" he recalled. But that was as hard a time as he would give to anyone involved with the parody production. He has no plans to sue or protest and in fact flew in from Denver for the show's premiere. He was greeted warmly by Ms. Soloway and Ms. Rowe, posed for pictures and cheerfully answered theological questions from the cast.

"We're not upset this is happening," Mr. Roberts said. "I'm out here to affirm what Hell House is all about--that sin always leads to a devastating and destructive end, but that hope is found in Jesus Christ. In the heart of the entertainment capital, something that is important to us is being presented. It's an honor. Even if they don't agree with our message, they realize we've got something here."

Mr. Roberts traveled to Los Angeles with a small entourage that included Elizabeth Nixon, an Ohio State University folklore professor whose doctoral dissertation is on religious haunted houses. "Elizabeth believes Hell House has been the strongest influence on evangelism in the last 10 years," Mr. Roberts noted with satisfaction. For her part, Ms. Nixon (who is not an evangelical) hoped that the pastor "isn't hurt too badly" by the parody production.

He didn't seem to be. When he finally saw the show, he was polite--if unamused by the raucous tone and hoots of laughter from the audience. "Well, they made a mockery," he said afterward. "What you saw was not what I wrote. The structure was scene by scene, but they made a definite effort toward deriding me. The production values were like a really bad B-movie, maybe a D-movie. Our hell scene, for instance, has burning limburger cheese that makes it almost impossible to walk in. We truly communicate that hell is not some place you want to go; it's not like turning on Comedy Central. "But I'm not here because of what they're doing with it," Mr. Roberts added. "I'm here because of what God is doing with it--and that's much bigger than what you see here on Hollywood Boulevard."

Ms. Soloway walked up at that moment. "What did you think?" she asked.

"Interesting," Mr. Roberts said.

"Well, thank you for coming," she replied.

Try to imagine for a minute this exchange occurring after a show parodying the tenets of radical Islam, which certainly has its own share of kitsch. You can't, because even if Hollywood hipsters got past worrying about seeming like Muslim-bashers, their own fears of a fatwa would shut the thing down before it even began. There are some forms of hell that even Bill Maher can't joke about.