Reverend, All I Really Wanted Was a Mars Bar

Ah, Halloween: A playful celebration of tricks, treats and, um, eternal damnation. The latter, at least, in Cedar Hill, Texas, and Santa Fe, N.M., where two church-sponsored "haunted houses" are raising many an eyebrow. The fright pageants include reenactments of the Columbine High shootings, and, apparently, they don't leave much to the imagination. In fact, the gruesome Santa Fe display ground to a halt when the local sheriff discovered the "actors" were using real guns — albeit loaded with blanks — in the massacre scene. The church's pastor (and creative director) told police the guns were only "props"; the guns were replaced with toys and the show went on.

In Texas, the Assembly of God "Hell House" is a wall-to-wall smorgasbord of similar skits: A Columbine rampage reenactment segues nicely into a depiction of a girl dying after playing with a Ouija board at a party, a young gay man dying painfully of AIDS and a young woman bleeding to death after a botched abortion. The dead all descend into a fiery and generally unpleasant version of hell. "We're trying to scare them into accepting Jesus," the Santa Fe pastor told the Associated Press. Not surprisingly, several parents in Columbine are not pleased with the choice of dramatic material, and protest what they call the churches' offensive and opportunistic portrayal of April's killings. Of course, says TIME writer David van Biema, "If you buy into the idea of the scenes in these haunted houses as representative of modern choices that lead to hell, it's not really inconsistent to include Columbine. Especially considering that Columbine has riveted the evangelical world, giving them a martyr and a couple of killers who denounced religion."

Issues of taste aside, there is the matter of timing. There is something strange about the juxtaposition of the terrifying themes surrounding Columbine and the lighthearted ghosts, goblins and, OK, gore of Halloween. Perhaps even more troubling is the pastors' claim that their displays are a vehicle to reach an MTV generation inured to horrific images of violence and death. While possibly well-meaning, such pandering almost inevitably sabotages the very message they are trying to communicate, compromised by the apparently opportunistic trappings of their latest crusade. And Friday there was a reminder that the subjects of the trite church tableaux are, in fact, only too real; in Cleveland, police uncovered a Columbine-like plot in a city high school, foiling a planned massacre by 11 students.