An American Haunting

Based on the heavily documented case of an alleged haunting in rural 19th-century Tennessee — the only case in U.S. history in which a supernatural entity was officially determined to be the cause of a human being's death — this disappointingly routine ghost story is only interesting in retrospect. Saddled with a corny wraparound story, the film opens in current-day Red River, Tennessee, where a teenage girl is having terrible nightmares after discovering a broken doll and an old journal entitled "The Truth of Our Family History" in the attic. Her mother soon realizes the account was written by a woman named Lucy Bell (Sissy Spacek), and begins to read about the Bell...