Smiling through ominous goth makeup, the demon whispered in the ears of each protester, planting racist slurs and stirring up divisions. The verbal combat was punctuated by the sound of an exploding handgun fired by a Trump supporter into the chest of a BLM activist, who collapsed to the ground, dead.

There were angry Trump supporters shouting to our left, and enraged Black Lives Matter protesters on our right. A snide demon slithered from one side to the other, proudly exclaiming, "Welcome to my world, where anyone different from you is a threat, where evil grows and hatred runs deep! It's one of my oldest and most successful tactics!"

"Scaring people into salvation has often been a part of the Christian tradition," according to R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics . "Dante wrote about it in The Inferno. And the Puritans had their own way of scaring Christians with the afterlife. But the immersive medium of a hell house is a somewhat new way of scaring people into virtue, and it is terrifying."

Hell houses are one of many theatrical productions that evangelical Christians host to reinforce these ideas. They combine interactive theater and haunted-house scare tactics, with the goal of impressing on each patron the fact that the forces of good and evil are at war for their soul.

With the protest scene in particular, it seemed to be saying the racial divisions in our current political climate weren't caused by systemic bias, economic injustice, and mass incarceration—they're the result of trickster sprites stirring up trouble on both sides.

It was in the wake of the deafening gun blast at Trinity Church's Hell House 27: No Escape in Dallas, Texas, that I remembered just how toxic an evangelical hell house could be. The overarching message of this—and the countless other hell houses happening this Halloween—is that every ailment plaguing society today (drug addiction, domestic abuse, sex trafficking, gun violence) is evidence that there are demons around us aiming to seduce us into sin, death, and eternal torment in hell.

The concept of hell houses was first popularized by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s, but only seriously took off in the 90s and 2000s when evangelical churches around the country made them an annual staple of their ministry. It was their tackling of social issues like abortion and gay marriage that made them a reliable source of controversy.

The Trinity Church hell house became one of the most notorious when, in 1999, it recreated the Columbine School shooting a mere six months after it happened, portraying the killers as agents of Satan aiming to slaughter all the Christian students. This led to the church being the subject of the popular 2002 documentary, Hell House—which was recently featured in an episode of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

From the perspective of a Christian who believes the world is governed by supernatural warfare, these hell houses are a kind of public service, akin to car-crash footage being used to scare teenagers in driver's ed.

"Something is out to destroy our kids," explained Pastor John Michael Barajas, director of the Trinity's hell house this year. "We want to shed light on what the enemy is trying to do to our children. Whether you believe in God or not, you can't see the suicide rate, the murder rate, and deny that there is something after our kids."