HELL HOUSE / One

ABORTION GIRL SETTLES back on the hospital gurney and adjusts her pyjama bottoms, which are pink and decorated with cartoon pictures of cats. To protect her against the October chill, she wears socks which bear a Santa Claus motif. Around her, the other girls work quickly. Heather, the scene foreman and nurse, is tearing up pieces of gauze. A cowled demon sprinkles the walls with rubbing alcohol. Amber, the delivering angel, is tutting over the long muddy mark up the front of her white surplice. But it's really Sarah's show: Sarah is Abortion Girl.

There's a lot of competition for parts in Hell House, especially among the girls. "Everybody," Heather says, "wants to be Abortion Girl, or be in the Rape Suicide Scene. You get to act really dramatic."

"And," adds Michelle, the doctor, "they're the biggest chick parts."

Sarah has been appearing in Hell House since the age of nine. "And my scenes have got more dramatic and better since then. I've played a demon, an angel, a girl in a car wreck scene, a girl being abused by her father, and then this." Playing Abortion Girl is summit of Sarah's achievements so far. She is 14 this year.

Abortion Girl is a particularly demanding part. Every seven minutes for the next two hours, Sarah will be wheeled into the operating theatre. She will have to scream, and scream: for her lost baby, for deliverance from her pain, and, finally, for Jesus to save her. Only then, under the protective gaze of Amber the angel, will she die. Sometimes Sarah screams so much that she is unable to speak at school the next day.

There are only a few minutes to spare before the evening's performance. The first audience is outside. Sarah pops open a plastic bottle of livid, viscous fluid and douses her pyjamas with it, working it in until the material is gruesomely saturated. With practised relish, the girls explain that the blood is made specially - from syrup, cooking oil and red food colouring. It looks horribly realistic. And it's very sticky. "But," says Sarah gleefully, "it tastes real good."

Sarah loves doing Hell House. The late nights, the sore throat from all the screaming - it's all worth it. "You're sending people to heaven and getting people saved," she says. "It's for God's glory."

OCTOBER 2002 marked the 12th consecutive year Hell House has been staged by the ministry and congregation of Trinity Church, of Cedar Hill, Texas. It began in 1990, to provide a Christian alternative to the Hallowe'en traditions of pantomime diabolism, trick-or-treating and, in particular, haunted houses. Every city in America has haunted houses - theme parks filled with sudden shocks, gory tableaux and walk-through theatrical set pieces - which open annually for the Hallowe'en season. And they're especially big in Texas. Here, the choice includes The Dungeon of Doom, Dr Blood's Screamscapes, The Asylum of Fear and, of course, Screams Park, 'the world's largest Hallowe'en theme park'.

Hell House offers something different. Instead of actors dressed as ghosts and ghouls, headless horsemen and vampires, the demon tour guides of Hell House walk visitors past scenes of human beings on the path to eternal damnation - under the gaze of a vengeful God. "We used to advertise it as, You've been to a haunted house, but you've never been to hell," says Tim Ferguson, who, as Youth Pastor at Trinity, who has overseen the project since 1994. "And that's still kind of there. But now, pretty much everybody knows what we do. Most people know it's a church thing. But some still come and they don't know."

Over the course of 40 minutes or so, the demons - or 'death monitors' - of Hell House escort groups of visitors down blackened tunnels, through a series of rooms and spaces. In each, a short scene from the dark side of everyday life is acted out - a drug deal, a rape, an abortion. In each, the protagonists make the wrong kind of decisions. Unchristian decisions. Fatal decisions. Decisions that will send them to hell. "The theme of Hell House," says Tim "is that in every scene, someone is going to die."

And finally, at the end of the tour, the audience is shown the inevitable results of all these lives lived, or at least extinguished, in Godless ways. They are taken to hell itself. Tim's target demographic is the same as the haunted houses: thrill-hungry teenagers. The hope is that they will be terrified into accepting Christ. Or, at the very least, scared straight.

"You go through Hell House," he says, "and there's 12 or 13 different themes: a drug theme, a rave theme, ecstasy, an abortion theme... and so you're not going to go through it and everything is going to affect you personally. But maybe one scene is gonna relate to your life and speak to you. And maybe when it comes time to make a decision in that area, you would choose not to take ecstasy. You would choose not to have an abortion. You would choose not to get involved in a drug deal."

Most of the Hell House audience is drawn from church youth groups. "There are certainly a lot of people who are in the church who do a lot of things they shouldn't be doing," he says. "And it is a great tool for young people to invite people who don't know anything about church. To get them to go to a place where they can receive a message - and not be threatened by a church building."

In the single month of its run through late October and early November, Tim expects this year's event - Hell House XII: the Unseen - to receive more than 10,000 paying visitors.

"Kids want to come to it. It's a pretty cool thing."

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