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In the media room at the Freud Museum in Vienna, home movies of the Freud family run on an endless loop. Entitled Freud: 1930–1939, the movies are narrated by Anna Freud, who oversaw their compilation and editing during the last two years of her life. Within these ostensibly "private" scenes of the Freud family, the family dogs assume a surprisingly central role. This essay argues that the focus on the dogs becomes a way to narrate and narrate around traumatic loss. For the Freuds these traumatic losses involved their forced exile to London, in 1938, as well as the later deaths of four of Freud's sisters in concentration camps. In combination, the flickering images from 1930–1939 and Anna Freud's voiceover—recorded some fifty years later—generate an elliptical and asynchronous accounting of loss. In addition to offering an intimate glimpse of the Freud family, the home movies thus raise broader questions about the temporality of witness and how we can see and hear the pain of the other. As one way into these questions, the essay reads with and against Sigmund Freud's account of repetition compulsion and the management of loss in Beyond the Pleasure Principle .

Every October, hundreds of evangelical churches across the United States mount Hell Houses, Christian riffs on the haunted houses that dot the landscape of U.S. secular culture each Halloween season. Where haunted houses seek to scare you for fun, Hell Houses aim to scare you to Jesus. In a typical Hell House, actors playing demon tour guides take the audience though a series of bloody staged tableaux depicting sinners whose bad choices—homosexuality, abortion, suicide, and, above all, rejection of Christ's saving grace—lead them straight to hell. My essay discusses Hell Houses's use of, and confidence in, theatre as a medium of evangelization, a confidence that nonetheless evinces considerable anxiety around how to represent sexuality, especially homosexuality. I focus my analysis on the Hell House staged by the New Destiny Christian Center in the Denver suburb of Thornton, Colorado, in October 2006. This church also distributes Hell House kits through a sophisticated online ministry effort. I supplement this discussion with reference to the 2001 documentary Hell House and by a comparison to a Hell House staged by a "secular" theatre group in Brooklyn, New York, in October 2006. My examination is in service of a larger set of questions about how religious feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated in the contemporary United States.

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