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An American Haunting

2006, Movie, PG-13, 84 mins

An American Haunting: Review

AMERICAN HAUNTING, AN
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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 family's terrifying ordeal in Red River some 200 years earlier. The trouble begins in late 1817, when Lucy's slave-owning husband, John Bell (Donald Sutherland), becomes embroiled in a land dispute that not only ruins his good name but so angers the plaintiff, a reputed witch named Kate Batts (Gaye Brown), that she openly curses him and his beautiful adolescent daughter, Betsy (Rachel Hurd Wood). A few months later, strange occurrences begin to plague the Bell family. While out hunting deer with his oldest son (Thom Fell), John is harassed by a spectral black wolf. At night Lucy awakes to the sound of footsteps in the empty attic. But it's Betsy who bears the worst of this bizarre onslaught: Night after night, she's pulled from her bed, hoisted off the ground by her hair and beaten by some invisible but very powerful force. Exhausted by these punishing assaults, Betsy begins to visibly weaken. Her skeptical teacher, Professor Powell (James D'Arcy), refuses to believe that anything supernatural is afoot in the Bell household. John, however, is certain his daughter is the victim of a malevolent spirit loosed by Kate Batts and begins to fear that Betsy may not survive the torment. Throughout the film, doors slam, windows shatter and poor, battered Betsy wakes up screaming with tiresome regularity; even Sutherland appears bored by it all. Writer-director Courtney Solomon based his screenplay on Brent Monahan's The Bell Witch: An American Haunting, a fictionalized account of this oft-told tale, and fails to give it the proper historical context — like outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria, reports of hauntings tend to occur during moments of unsettling social change. Solomon, it turns out, has something else in mind to help explain what happened to Betsy Bell. But he saves it until the very end, by which point you may have already lost interest in all that banging and screaming. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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