Week 1 (June 21 – 27) – Welcome to HELL
The summer’s here, so get ready to broil!
Bruce Neubauer somehow made this movie in under an hour, and unlike so many Christian scare movies, this isn’t for a strictly religious audience. It also presents a world where teen parties are filled with strobes, people who want to fight you at every turn and dudes being amped up for no reason. It’s why I stayed in my room as a teen and just watched horror movies.
The title comes from Matthew 10:28, which says, “Do not fear the one who can kill only the body. Fear the one who can kill both the body and soul in Hell.”
But yeah, if you spent your formative years wandering the aisles of a religious bookstore or caught a weird, low-budget educational film during a Sunday night youth service, you know exactly the feel. This is a low-budget religious horror cautionary tale shot in the heart of Lorain, Ohio, right near where Superhost once lip-synced “Convoy” on WUAB.
Mary is a young woman doing everything in her power to burn the bridge between herself and her Christian upbringing. She’s fighting with her parents, running with a crowd that has zero interest in going to church and generally acting out. Mary yells at everyone, from her mom and dad to her friends, to people trying to drive drunk and blast some alt-rock, and anyone else she talks to. If I went to high school with Mary, I’d be making her mix tapes and getting more obsessed about her the more she shouted barbed epithets at me.
After a night of carousing leads to a near-death experience — man, the dudes in Lorain are aggressive and just want to murder — Mary is forced to confront exactly what the title promises: a vision of the afterlife that is intended to be as terrifying as possible. And that’s after watching nearly all of her friends die.
Yes, religion as cosmic horror.
You aren’t watching this for the cinematography or the high-end special effects. You’re watching it for that one specific sequence where the low budget actually enhances the surreal, unsettling nature of Hell. It’s a classic example of how limited resources often force filmmakers to get weirder than a studio ever would. It’s not the Hell you expect, with flames. Instead, it’s a black void where shafts of light and Italian movie fog pour out, and all the demons have big teeth like something out of a Todd McFarlane comic. Where most modern religious movies just go to the Spirit Store, the filmmakers went into their heads to make something that feels not just alien, but terrifying.
Two asides:
- I’ve been reading a lot lately about how the reveal of aliens will upend religion, perhaps because, as Bob Lazar claims, Jesus was a created being made to keep humans taking care of the containers that are our souls. If this is revealed, people feel like the world would go to pieces. But the millennial kids — or the 90s ones here — seem like they couldn’t care less.
- When people go on and on about hidden movies or lost films, it’s always the same ones. Instead of obsessing about the next 4K UHD, you should open your mind to the sheer volume of underseen religious cinema, which is often way weirder, more earnest — and yes, both things true at once — than anything else you can find hunting for little-cared-about movies. Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, Mondo Macabro — no one is going to release a slipcover special edition of this film.
This is a movie with a teen in a vampire mask telling us how drunk he is, living in a town where white kids drink 40s while hanging out the window of their parents’ cars, and everyone is packing guns. I don’t want to live there, but the visit was interesting.
You can watch this on YouTube.
