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In anticipation of getting my hands on a copy of Jesus Camp, I watched two loosely similarly themed documentaries last week. Here is a little bit on each of them.

Devil’s Playground (2002, directed by Lucy Walker) is about a period in every Amish teen’s life called Rumspringa (”running around”). During Rumspringa, adolescents are given the freedom to experience “English” ways of life, with the expectation that they will find a spouse and make the decision to be a part of the Amish religion, permanently. Walker introduces us to a handful of such youths, and we observe both mild and extreme examples of this new freedom.

I found this doc to be fairly objective, although some more input from Amish adults would have been insightful. There are a few interviews and comments from the adult Amish community, but I wanted to see more of how the subjects’ families were reacting to this period that I’m sure is pretty stressful to deal with. It was interesting to see how some of the teens had no questions at all as to what they would decide, and how others really struggled with the implications of either choice. Somewhere in the final third of the film it morphed from a documentary about this Amish period into a film more about the characters (Faran especially), which brought it down to a more personal level.

There’s some great footage and the tone is gentle while sometimes painfully revealing. Walker seems to really care about her subjects and I’m sure that this is how she was allowed to be present in so many of the situations we witness.

Hell House (2001, directed by George Ratliff) is about a suburban Dallas Christian church that puts on a haunted house each Hallowe’en, which thousands of people go through each year. The film was the church’s tenth annual Hell House, so if it’s still happening, they would have just had their fifteenth. This isn’t an ordinary haunted house, though: it’s very “real life” and depicts graphic dramas of situations where young people are seen either choosing God or not. The situations are pretty extreme, and range from suicide, homosexuality/AIDS, pregnancy/abortion, raves, rape, drugs to other pleasantries.

The people in charge of this event are very intense. Vigorous and competitive auditions are held for each of the parts. It’s a bit creepy hearing girls say that they want to be the rape victim or a guy saying that he wants to be the one that blows his brain out. They take extreme examples and present them as if the cause undoubtedly equals the effect. For example, one girl goes to a rave, takes drugs from a strange boy and ends up getting gang raped. Then she goes home and is taunted by a demon about how she is such a bad person. Obviously, then, rave = drugs = gang rape = feeling bad… just for example.

Ratcliff gives a little bit of insight and background into the leaders behind Hell House as well as some of the “actors”, but I felt that it was just to feel sympathy for them, and then maybe not so angry. There is no doubt as to to the passion that they feel for their project, but except for a couple of scenes, I don’t think we get enough specific responses to it. All-in-all, this is a so-so film that could have been much deeper, especially given the controversial subject matter.