HEN the Trinity Church of Cedar Hill, Tex., wants to scare the pants off you around Halloween, it doesn't do it with a typical haunted house featuring ghosts, goblins and ghouls. Instead, it erects a Hell House in which congregants act out Grand Guignolesque scenes warning of the dangers of sinful behavior.

At Hell House — actually a series of house trailers — the church stages one scene in which a gay man dying of AIDS is mocked by a grinning demon who welcomes him into Hell. [See photo.]  Another vignette warns you to watch out what drugs you consume, because you might overdose, and then that friend of the Evil One will drag you into purgatory. Abortions? Spousal abuse? Suicide? At Hotel Lucifer you can check in, but you can never leave.

"We believe in the message, that if you don't have Jesus, you're going to hell," said Tim Ferguson, the youth minister at Trinity, a Pentecostal church. "It is a desperation to convince you that our message is true. But Hell House is more about what happens when you make bad choices."

Speaking of bad choices, Trinity may have made one in 1999, when it decided to re-create the Columbine massacre in its Hell House only months after the real event. The theatrics attracted national media attention, much of it negative.

But as far as the Texas-born, New York-based filmmaker George Ratliff was concerned, most of its critics missed the point. "I was curious about the theology that allowed this behavior," said Mr. Ratliff. "I don't think this culture has ever been accurately portrayed in a documentary or film. They're really easy to poke fun at, because these guys are so over the top."

The outcome of Mr. Ratliff's curiosity is "Hell House," a documentary opening on Friday at Cinema Village in New York. The film is a portrait of Trinity's year 2000 Hell House extravaganza — called by its creators "Hell House X: The Walking Dead" — which attracted more than 12,000 paying customers (at $7 each) during its seven-night run in October. "Hell House" follows church members as they plan the event, write the script, hold auditions and rehearsals, and build sets. It is also a fascinating, and nonjudgmental, look at a religious community that is almost totally isolated from the mainstream culture, even though it sits smack in the middle of a Dallas suburb.

"To really understand them, you have to understand first and foremost that the majority of these people are thinking on a spiritual level, and it's really end-time thinking," said Mr. Ratliff, who also directed "Plutonium Circus," a 1995 documentary about a Texas nuclear weapons plant. "They have their own church, school and entertainment. They don't want you to go out to Hollywood movies, they don't want you to take in the secular world, and they're very worried about the Internet."

To make the film, Mr. Ratliff flew down to Texas with a cinematographer as soon as he heard about the Columbine controversy and began filming. He then hung around for a few days shooting church services and interviewing the locals. Mr. Ratliff then cut what he'd shot into a 10-minute short, which he used to obtain financing. The short film's objectivity also convinced church leaders that Mr. Ratliff could be trusted and that he was the right man to make a documentary about them.

"They had seen themselves skewered again and again on the TV," Mr. Ratliff said, "and this was the first time they got to explain what they were trying to do."

Mr. Ratliff, the son of "a really lonely atheist in Amarillo," as he put it, began work on the film in June 2000. He returned to Cedar Hill, spent time at the church and figured out who the major players in his movie were going to be. His crew arrived in August, when Hell House preliminaries were under way, and stayed until November. Mr. Ratliff also made an important creative decision at this time: to pose church members in front of a stark white background as they discussed issues of faith and commitment. The sequences humanize the members and add an ethereal, almost spiritual, quality to the documentary.

Trinity is not the only Pentecostal church that puts on a Hell House. Several churches even sell Hell House starter kits to other houses of worship. These packets, which can cost as much as $150, include everything from scripts to prop advice and CD's with sound effects.

Not surprisingly, Hell Houses have attracted criticism, especially by gay rights and women's groups. They have also offended some mainstream Christian organizations, which say the Hell Houses try to proselytize through fear. Certainly there is a coercive nature to the experience: at the end of the film, visitors are shown passing through a lurid series of dramatized vignettes and then entering a room where they are told that only seconds away is yet another room where they reconsecrate their lives to Christ. The implication is that those who don't are doomed.

"Jesus talked a lot about Hell," Mr. Ferguson said of these scare tactics in a telephone interview. "It was a subject he dealt with quite frequently. The fear aspect of that is one part of the message. A good leader will sometimes teach out of fear, but it's not the only way you teach."

"Hell House" has its absurdist moments. The earnest amateurishness of the actors is painful to watch, and some of the tableaux, in particular a rave sequence, look like outtakes from early Roger Corman exploitation films. Yet the horrified reactions of some of the spectators, most of them from Christian youth groups, are startlingly real. And Mr. Ratliff's film objectively shows how the Pentecostal movement, with the church members speaking in tongues, creates a caring, self-contained community.

THE church is "very populist," said Mr. Ratliff. "You could enter a Pentecostal church and become anyone's equal the moment you speak in tongues. That means the spirit of God chose to enter you as much as the priest. And it's a more emotional and involved experience for people; they've always been great entertainers. This is the first church to have electric guitars, to have shows. And Hell House is just an outgrowth of that."

Yet Mr. Ratliff admits it was difficult to maintain his even-handed tone. He says he disagrees with the right-wing politics of churches like Trinity and considers the parishioners close-minded. Mr. Ratliff says it would have been easy to ridicule the church members. "I'm lucky because I had a very disciplined editor," he said, referring to Michael Lahaie. "Just when you think they're really being made fun of, the film will be offset with something you kind of empathize with."

Which is undoubtedly why Mr. Ferguson said he was "stunned at how fair" the film is.

"I think there will be a lot of stereotypes reinforced about strongly religious people," he said, "but I think audiences will be surprised how much they like some of the people in the film. I think it works really well, and it really shows our message."

Mr. Ratliff appreciates the praise. But he has his own ideas about the "Hell House" message. When asked what he would like New York audiences to get from the experience, Mr. Ratliff didn't hesitate to reply: "An appreciation for where they live."  

Lewis Beale is a senior writer at Us Weekly.