An American Haunting

An American Haunting...2005...83 minutes...unrated...starring Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D'Arcy, and Rachel Hurd-Wood...written and directed by Courtney Solomon, based off the novel by Brent Monahan.

Set in Red River, TN, the movie has a story-within-a-story framework, where a modern young girl is having horrible nightmares, and has managed to recover an old doll as well as some family letters from the attic. Her mother starts reading the letters and is led into the main tale of her ancestors: the Bell family. They have found themselves afflicted with an evil spirit after another townsperson...reputed to be a witch...curses the family for being financially wronged. The spirit focuses on the daughter of John Bell, Betsy, and the tale follows the family and others drawn in to help protect the teenage girl from the wrathful entity.

I'll get to the gist of what bothers me with this movie; and it has nothing to do with acting, cinematography, or any of the other technical aspects of the film as a film. I'll also try to be brief, but it bears some explaining. I'm not a native Tennessean; having moved down to Knoxville from western NY thirty years ago this summer. Still, having been brought up in this area as it were, I'd like to think some of the area's culture has rubbed off on me. And while most of the nation would simply consider the people in the movie fictional characters, it's based off of accounts written by the Bell family...who still have descendants in this state.

I went to school with a young woman who was part of the Bell family. I don't know how directly she was related to these particular peoples, nor were we close...just schoolmates and classmates, which is its own curious relationship. The point, however, is that the story isn't about a "faceless" family, if you can follow my gist. The ending of the movie makes an interesting allegation...I can't say with any authority if it's true or not, and honestly it doesn't make a difference in my mind. If it is, then to my mind the movie is spreading a family's dirty laundry out to the world as entertainment...and while no one has ever accused of Hollywood of having good taste (or accused me of the same, either...with reason.) I find this horribly tacky. If the story isn't true, then the director is damaging reputations, spreading vicious gossip, and acting ...again... inappropriately, in my opinion.

[Also, for something that's supposed to be a retelling of the legend, there's a lot that's just left out. Andrew Jackson's run-in with the Bell Witch, for example...gone.] 

So, as spoiler-free as possible (which I also find tacky, but in this case less so than what I just discussed), I give this movie 1.5 old moppets out of 5; for sheer bad taste.