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Inside the Nightmare

Michael Mason

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October 31, 2010

For years, I’ve wanted to attend The Nightmare, arguably the most popular Christian haunted house of them all, but I could never find anyone to go with me—not even my wife. Ten thousand souls a night can pass through the spectacle at GUTS Church in Tulsa, and at a starting ticket price of eight dollars a head, it’s a moneymaker that shakes the entire month of October. On the drive up, a church billboard euphemistically boasts “15 Years of Scaring the…” and your brain fills in the rest. The hell out of you, you think? Wrong. It should actually read “Fifteen years of scaring the heterosexual out of you.”

Although The Nightmare’s frights are mainly existential in nature, you’ll be far more disturbed by the parade of unfortunate hairstyles than you will by most of the gruesome walk-through skits inside. The real goal of The Nightmare is to traumatize you into a paranoid state and then proselytize you. It’s a straightforward, sincere affair meant to save you from hellfire, just like the Inquisition. Nobody in his or her right mind would want to go, unless you’re in the mood to be degraded or offended. As a journalist, I see offense as opportunity. I was ready to be outraged, but I wasn’t prepared for the most homoerotic experience of my life.

When I pulled into the cone-pocked parking lot at GUTS on the night before Halloween, an Abercrombied teenaged girl approached me and offered to shorten the typical two-hour wait for me if I paid an extra charge, and I happily agreed. She directed me to a special parking lot for the impatient. Once out of the car, I found my way toward a large metal warehouse that serves as GUTS’ youth church when it isn’t Tulsa’s epicenter of sexual repression. Inside, the building has all the sex appeal of a meatpacking factory, the minimalist decor complemented by metal rails and a herd of glazed-over expressions.

Before you proceed to your particular waiting pen, GUTS church requires that you fill out a release form, a laughable slip of paper that’s begging for a lawsuit and a copy-edit. It reads:

WARNING: The Nightmare is a graphic depiction of real life trauma and violence; it is intended to scare you; pregnant women and/or persons with heart conditions should not enter. Strobe lights and microwaves are in use. No one under the age of 12 shall be admitted. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK; no one is responsible for any injury or damage you may suffer as a direct or indirect result of your going through the “Nightmare.”

I signed the form and stepped up on a platform. A husky teen security guard directed me to hold out my arms as he wanded me, sliding the probe along my arms and inbetween my legs. After clearing the wandjob, I flashed my wristband at a gatekeeper who showed me straight into a large metal pen with about twenty people, the majority of them minors. I completely bypassed the three hundred other people waiting in line, and didn’t feel the slightest pang of guilt until I realized they were being subjected to a Jack Black movie at full volume.

As a confluence of Old Navy and young hormones, the waiting pen was terrifying enough on its own. I stood packed among a cluster of redneck kids, most of them fourteen to twenty, all of them wearing anxious expressions on their faces. Soon, a couple of yellow-jacketed security guards appeared and shepherded us into even smaller quarters, a tiny room where our Nightmare guide was awaiting us—a cue no doubt taken from Disney’s Haunted Mansion, only lacking in purpose. With Christian heavy metal music blaring, I couldn’t hear a word the guide yelled, though I’m sure it was an extension of the release form.

We weren’t in the room more than a minute before we were pushed through a curtain and onto a metal floor that started clanking like an antique rollercoaster. It stopped with a deafening bang, the kind of bang that hollows you out when you hear a car wreck. We pushed our way through a curtain and shuffled into a large room, the scene of a fresh collision between a schoolbus and what I guessed was a drunk driver. I was expecting gore, but instead got a Las Vegas-version, complete with blue lighting and bad acting. A blood-caked girl wandered the room, her severed arm tucked under her intact arm. She was screaming out for her mother when any other person would be demanding an orthopedic surgeon.

I hardly had time to smirk before I felt the firm hand of the security guard pushing me toward the next room, where a faceless business dad sat quite unamused as we listened to his teenaged daughter ranting in the room next door. In the next moment, we’re actually in the girl’s room, watching her bounce off the walls in what looks like a meth-fueled frenzy—a typical Jerry Springer routine. She’s extremely cute, and it occurs to me that hers is a prize role in The Nightmare—the teenage suicide. None of us want to see a depressed obese girl overdose on Valium; we want to see a vixen blow her brains out, which is exactly what she does. Only the gore is downplayed. When she pulls the trigger, a light flashes, the room dims, and a spotlight focuses on the blood-spattered wall behind her slumped over body.

She isn’t dead five seconds before we find ourselves in a school cafeteria packed with maybe two dozen middle school kids, more church volunteers. Here we go, I think: Columbine, the real American nightmare. The only difference is that in this particular school shooting, I’m looking around for kids that I think make good targets. There’s one in a “Jesus’s Gym” t-shirt that ought to be shot for the fashion faux-pas, as well as a school teacher whose soul patch is begging for a bullet. Soon enough, a tortured red-haired loser opens his backpack and starts pumping lead throughout the room. All the kids go apeshit, the best actors of the night by far, and the room turns into a frenzy of flashing lights. I’m already feeling bored by the time we get ushered through an unlit hallway.

The next room makes no sense, it’s such a departure from the true-life themes. We’re in a redneck butcher’s shed reminiscent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and a couple of Tarantinoesque characters are doing some bloodwork behind a curtain. A well-Vaselined church usher wearing a trenchcoat pushes through the crowd, shoving a rubber rat in people’s faces and eliciting a few screams. I barely have time to register the absurdity of this scene before we’re corralled into The Nightmare’s climax: Hell.

The place of eternal damnation, it turns out, is actually a large cage with lots of canned fog and techno music. I’ve been here at least a dozen times throughout college, I think, only this time it’s much weirder because there aren’t any drugs or alcohol. A security guy comes by and positions me so my back is against the cage, and I’m waiting for the coup d’état, the fire, the brimstone, the appearance of Lucifer himself.

Someone does show up, but quietly. A tall, lean teenaged guy in a black leotard and white face paint appears before me. He crouches down low before me, then slides up, rubbing his chest against mine. His tongue, no lie, pushes out towards my face, and he’s making an erotic licking sound as he gyrates closer to me. Holy shit, I grin, taking the boy’s advance as a compliment. Another boy pops his head behind mine and starts making orgasmic groans into my ear. I haven’t had my boundaries violated like this since my last visit to my gastroenterologist. I’m smiling ear to ear, realizing that Christian hell is a gay club fantasy, and soon the demon boys vanish, no doubt confused by my expression. Why, I wondered, is The Nightmare not a huge hit in Tulsa’s gay community?

Maybe it’s just me reading too much into the situation, I think, before we’re ushered into the next non-sequitor: the torture of the Christ. In the center of the room, the Jesus character is wearing a lacerated rubber t-shirt that’s oozing blood. He’s kneeling over a tree stump, and it’s a lurid scene, but only for a moment. When I look up, I expect to see a bunch of Roman soldiers jeering at the Christ, but instead I behold the entire stable of GUTS’ teenage studs, all shirtless, oiled, and wearing tight blue jeans. They’re each carrying bullwhips and wearing stern faces. The boys pose and strut across the room before they invariably crack their whip at the Christ. I’m standing there, peering into the room’s corners, looking for the camera, certain that Jamie Kennedy is going to appear and put his arm around me, welcoming me as a victim of his S&M hidden camera skit.

Kennedy doesn’t show up. Instead, we’re paraded past a latex-covered Christ on a cross in the next room, spewing blood. Although he looks more like a melting popsicle than the Son of God, the display is still the most pornographic scene in The Nightmare. When I turn my eyes away, I see looks of sheer terror on the young faces around me. They’ve bought into all ten minutes of this sick psychodrama, hook, line and crucifix. Each young person has been primed to the point of vulnerability, and my heart aches for them. In the next room, we get a video taped message from GUTS’ pastor (think a roided-up Gomer Pyle), giving us a true post-modern altar call. His digital avatar ushers people to salvation through the magic of television, while the meatspace preacher is probably out dining on blue-collar dollars.

The last skit in The Nightmare is the scariest. We’re ushered into a canvas tent. Each person in our group is accosted by a Bible-armed church volunteer who wants to save your soul. They’ve been brainwashed into thinking they’re doing the right thing, and that by preying on the terrified, somehow they’re being courageous. That’s the scary part.

“I’m the guy you’ve been fearing the whole night,” my proselytizer tells me. I feel sorry for the kid, so I let him talk a little.

“Do you know Jesus?” he finally asks me.

“I thought I did,” I say, “But you guys have really opened me up to a new understanding of him tonight—that Passion scene was really, uh, passionate.”

“Great,” he says. “And are you sure if you died tonight that you would go to heaven?”

I think about the spasmodic suicidal actress gunning for an Oscar, and the boy rifleman smiling as he pumps out his darker urges through play-acting. A glimpse of the Gay Techno Demons of Hell flash in my mind, and I imagine that in the dark, the boys finally feel free, even if they are molesting innocent bystanders. And there’s the Chippendale Romans, each endearingly unaware that they’re acting out the art director’s torture fetish.

“You don’t understand,” I tell him, “I’m already in heaven.”

Editor’s note: This article refers to an October 2007 visit to The Nightmare.

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