An American Haunting

Rule one for directors of movies about well known legends, you cannot change them for entertainment purposes. I love the story of the Bell Witch, it’s a story of a vengeful entity that torments the Bell family and is believed to be the only ghost to have ever killed a living person. Awesome right? Well, In Courtney Solomon’s version, it is a story of repressed memories and a daughter diddling dad. Keep in mind that Solomon’s previous movie was the equally uncomfortable Dungeons and Dragons obtaining a talented cast Uwe Boll would be envious of.

An American Haunting opens to the present day where a young girl is being chased through the woods and into her house eventually locking herself into her room. No worries, nothing is chasing her, this is one of those scenes where you think something cool is going to happen and it turns out that it is a dream. The girl’s mother wakes her and tells her to get ready because her father is coming to pick her up. From the girl’s response, you’d think she wasn’t excited to see her dad for the weekend. As she gets ready, her mother discovers an old porcelain doll and a diary. Scolding her daughter for going into the attic she takes the findings into her office and begins to read the story of the “Bell Witch” through the eyes of the local school teacher who was a witness to the haunting.

Flashback time. We meet the Bell family as some shit is going down in the town’s courtroom, where John Bell is getting the shakedown for charging an interest rate on a land loan that was well above what the church approved, even though he was only trying to stick it to the local witch, Kate Batts. He loses his good name in the proceedings and is then cursed by Kate. After this point, mysterious things start to occur in the Bell household. John begins to be chased by a black wolf and his daughter, Betsy begins to be attacked. Her hair is pulled, her face is slapped and she has visions of faceless little girl. Both the health of Betsy and her father begins to degrade.

Betsy’s school teacher takes notice, and is asked to come and see for himself what the family is going through. As John Bell becomes more frail and Betsy has less lines, they believe that the cause of their torment is the curse that Kate Batts put on them. John confronts her and asks her to lift the curse and to kill him. She denies the curse, saying that he cursed himself. So he proceeds to try and kill himself but the gun fails to fire and he begins to do this really ugly crying thing in the middle of the woods. At the same time, the house servant comes in with a bundle of material. It is discovered to be John’s shirt and Betsy’s night dress with a very obvious spot of blood on the crotch area. However Mrs. Bell thinks this might be just a red wine stain and is all part of the elaborate spell upon the family.

Betsy is beaten more, and john gets sick. Then in a really really bad flashback-flashback, it is revealed that the whole family knew but was repressing the knowledge that daddy did Betsy and tried to hide it and now the repressed spirit of Betsy, the part that “died” the night the really icky thing happened is beating Betsy until she remembers, and making John sick. In the closing scene of the diary, Betsy poisons her father while her mother looks on.

So this is a new twist. Back to the present, and the young girls father has arrived to pick her up. The vision of Betsy appears to warn the mother who now understands that her father is a dirty pervert. End scene.

Well, kudos for inviting a new point of view, but I am partial to the legend as it is and would have preferred to see this instead. The effects were embarrassingly bad, I actually felt bad for Donald Southerland who played John Bell. The whole movie missed the point of the story it was based on, and turned Southland into a pathetic actor who is willing to take any part presented to him.