Film review: 'An American Haunting' is too noisy to be scary

Published: Friday, May 5 2006 12:00 a.m. MDT

Sissy Spacek tries to comprehend supernatural events plaguing her house in "An American Haunting."

After Dark Films

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AN AMERICAN HAUNTING — ** 1/2 — Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland, Rachel Hurd-Wood; rated PG-13 (violence).

The spirits make way too much noise in "An American Haunting," a supernatural tale whose overbearing clamor is redeemed to a large extent by engaging performances and fine 19th-century period detail.

Like its awful modern cousin, last year's "The Amityville Horror" remake, things don't go bump in the night in "American Haunting" — they go shrieking and caterwauling.


Creepy as it is at times, "American Haunting" loses much of its fright potential amid the frenzied visuals and screeching vocalizations employed to re-create the horrors wrought by an unworldly presence tormenting a Tennessee farm family in the early 1800s.


With "American Haunting," it's hard to stay frightened when the film quickly establishes a pattern that another boom, bellow or hyperkinetic instance of poltergeist activity is just around the corner.

Thank the spirits for the divine presence of Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland as the earthy souls whose family is haunted, and Rachel Hurd-Wood as their daughter, the focus of the phantom's wrath.

Spacek and Sutherland play Lucy and John Bell, heads of the Red River, Tenn., family whose unexplained haunting has fascinated ghost-hunters for 200 years. The film begins with a notation that the Bell haunting was the only documented case in American history in which a spirit caused a person's death.




Compounding the hubbub is Caine Davidson's blaring score, which, like Solomon's visual and aural excesses, desensitizes viewers to the scares the story holds.


The actors are the saving grace, Spacek (the combination heroine-victim-villain of another unsubtle fright flick, "Carrie") a grand matriarch, Sutherland a confident man undone by powers outside his understanding, Hurd-Wood a mix of radiant approaching womanhood and animal terror.


"An American Haunting" is rated PG-13 for intense terror sequences and thematic material. Running time: 82 minutes.

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