An American Haunting (Film Review)
2005 Freestyle Releasing
Written and Directed by: Courtney Solomon; Starring: Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D'Arcy, and Rachel Hurd-Wood
MPAA Rating: PG-13; Running Time: 83 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 2/10
The Bell family is wealthy and well-respected in their Tennessee community, until the church finds family patriarch, John, guilty of usury. Now, they've not only lost their good name and connection to the church, but the woman John wronged, who just happens to be a rumored witch, is not happy that a loss of honor is John's only court-mandated consequence. Now it seems that she's cursed the family, particularly their teenaged daughter, Betsy. Betsy is visited in the night by some entity, who violently attacks her, in assaults that soon turn sexual. While the family's few remaining friends, including the local school teacher, remain skeptical, the mounting evidence, including witnessing Betsy levitate, is too much for them to disbelieve. But nothing seems able to force the entity out. Can Betsy be saved before the cruel spirit takes her life?
While I don't mind dragging major filmmakers, the elite, and huge studios, I actually don't derive a lot of pleasure insulting smaller, more indie productions, and their more lesser known filmmakers. However, I have seldom seen a filmmaker as ill-suited to material as Courtney Solomon is to what he's written and directed for 2005's An American Haunting.
I'm a fan of William Malone's 1999 chiller, House on Haunted Hill, and its nu-metal pleasures--the tone fits that film's material perfectly. Solomon directs An American Haunting, swooping, constantly moving camera, highly canted angles, like it's a Slipknot video, but this is a period piece that takes place in the early 19th Century. The tone is just wrong, so incredibly wrong it's almost unbelievable. For the $14-million dollar budget, though, the production values are top-notch. The costuming and sets look excellent, perfectly evocative of the period, and Solomon has somehow convinced Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek to be in this film...but his camera bobs and weaves between them like it just got loaded with celluloid cocaine.
The star of the show here is Rachel Hurd-Wood, who has to give a physically intense performance as the haunted Betsy. An enigmatic actress who often joked during the late 00s that she must have been cast so often as a victim because she is so pale, Hurd-Wood, of everyone, is most let down by the sub-par writing and directing here. There's rich and expansive folklore for Solomon to adapt here, but his film's late twist takes the Bell Witch Legend in an absolutely disgusting and offensive direction that the rest of the film is simply not capable of tackling. But even without that loathsome twist, the film leading up to it is so silly and scare-free, it's kind of like the dead cockroach on top of the garbage cake.
The star of the show here is Rachel Hurd-Wood, who has to give a physically intense performance as the haunted Betsy. An enigmatic actress who often joked during the late 00s that she must have been cast so often as a victim because she is so pale, Hurd-Wood, of everyone, is most let down by the sub-par writing and directing here. There's rich and expansive folklore for Solomon to adapt here, but his film's late twist takes the Bell Witch Legend in an absolutely disgusting and offensive direction that the rest of the film is simply not capable of tackling. But even without that loathsome twist, the film leading up to it is so silly and scare-free, it's kind of like the dead cockroach on top of the garbage cake.
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