Set in the year 1818 in Tenneessee, John Bell angers a neighboring woman over a property deal, and Bell is found guilty of usury and loses his good name. Not only that, but the woman swears vengeance upon Bell and his loved ones. Bell starts to see wolfs appear out of nowhere, while his daughter Betsy suffers attacks from some unknown entity that seems to be present in the house of Bell. The attacks keeps growing in strength and every night Betsy has to go through terrifying things when the entity shows up. College-educated school teacher Richard (James D'Arcy) is called upon to investigate how to drive the spirit away, but there seems to be no solution to Bell's problem.
Having heard a lot of bad stuff about An American Haunting, it was hard to feel very excited when I was about to watch it. On the other hand, I have never read anything about the Bell Witch so at least I didn't know how the story was gonna go down, as well as it would spare me from comparing the movie to the actual books written on the subject. I can't say that it was a great movie, but it was far better than I expected it to be. Although it really felt like commersial horror, which it is, and that always has more negative than positive things to it.
The most positive thing about An American Haunting is that it's based on true events. Now, imagine that for a sec, that it has actually happened for real. Like I said before, I haven't read the books about the Bell Witch so I have no idea how true the movie stays to the original story, but I will assume it's somewhat close just for the sake of it. With that in mind, you of course get a better experience out of watching An American Haunting, compared to if the story would've been fiction. Don't get me wrong here, I have absolutely no idea what went down in Tenneessee almost 200 years ago, but if you would assume that what you see actually has happened, it makes things a bit more scary, and we always want things more scary, don't we?
 
My main problem though, except for that the scares were non-effective, was the reason for why the entity kept tormenting John Bell's poor daughter Betsy. When watching Asian horror, the ghosts/spirits always seems to have a, even if not good, still a proper reason to act like they do. The spirit here has no real reason to keep attacking the poor girl, and even if there is a tiny reason, it's just not enough. I felt bad for the girl, being dragged outta bed and being tormented for a number of minutes, night after night. This is basically the whole movie itself, the girl keeps getting attacked and her family can't do nothing about it. They call in a priest, they call in an educated teacher, but they can't do nothing either so it just keeps going on until something even more bad happens.
Fortunately, the movie's not that long, it never really feels dragged out, and it has a pretty good pacing were a lot of stuff happens every now and then. The scares are way too dull though, but it's never a snooze-fest. The acting is good, and while Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, as man and wife, are ok as well as the rest of the cast, the best actress is Rachel Hurd-Wood who stars as Betsy. The scenery is pretty cool, but it's unfortunately never very eerie or unsettling for that matter, something that it would've really needed to be.
I found An American Haunting to be quite an ok movie with a somewhat interesting story. On the horror front it doesn't work too well though, and the scares were pretty lame. It's commersial horror, and people who are not used to watching horror flicks might find it to be a bit scary, but if you're a horror fan, don't expected to soil your pants outta fright.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Courtney Solomon
WRITING CREDITS: Brent Monahan, Courtney Solomon
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, Rachel Hurd-Wood
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 91 min
RATING: 6/10
An American Haunting Website/IMDB Click here
An American Haunting Trailer Click here
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