Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

CAUTION: PARTIAL SPOILER REVIEW. A teenage girl is troubled by bad dreams. Her mother discovers a book and starts to read about another girl in 1818 who had bad dreams in a case of a demonic curse. We then flash back to 1818 and the colonial frontier life of John Bell, a well to do rancher who built the local town church and school. He is found guilty of usury in a shady deal with his neighbor. The neighbor, who some say is a witch, wasn't happy with the outcome and apparently puts the whammy on John Bell. This is the head fake.Meanwhile, Bell's daughter Betsy is acting strange and invisible entities are haunting the Bell residence as doors open and close by themselves, people are pushed and dragged around, and of course the entity likes to remove the covers from a sleeping teenage girl and pin her to the mattress (no nudity in unrated version). Clearly these people have too much lead in their cooking utensils. The local schoolmaster plays the skeptic. This type of stuff goes on ad nauseum to the point that John Bell goes over to the witch's house. He gives her a gun and points it at his head, and asks her to take his life to remove the curse. The witch claims she didn't put any curse on John Bell, that he did it himself. At this point all the clues dropped during the story should be adding up.Neither Sutherland nor Spacek will be remembered for their performance in this movie.

This movie fuc*ing SUCKS. Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek deserve to be in a DECENT film, not a shi**y one like this.It's not scary at all and you even get bored during its stupid plot twist. It is also full of flaws. Some stupid cliché loud noises, sounds and even some nonsense scenes were added in an effort to make some scenes scary, it just made them worse.Not even Sissy and Donald could save this film. Their acting was GREAT as always, of course, but their were one of the only few good acting. The film itself is just pure sh*t.Watch a GREAT horror movie: The Exorcist.

An American Haunting is set in Red River in Tennessee in 2006 where a teenage girl named Jane (Isabelle Almgren-Doré) has been having violent nightmares, her mother Elizabeth (Susan Almgren) sits down to read a diary found in their attic. The diary dates from 1817 & was written by a woman named Lucy Bell (Sissy Spacek) who lived in the house with her husband John Bell (Donald Sutherland) & their two teenage children Betsy (Rachel Hurd Wood) & John Jr. (Thom Fell). The diary tells of the terrible events which have become known as the 'The Bell Witch Haunting' & begins as John Bell is excommunicated from the local Church after being found guilty of breaking Church law by charging 20% interest on a small loan to a woman named Kathe Batts (gaye Brown) who is known to be a witch & who places a curse upon John Bell & his entire family. Soon after John's daughter Betsy is attacked at night in her bedroom by an evil ghost, the attacks continue which threaten the whole family...This British, Romanian, Canadian & American co-production was written, produced & directed by Courtney Solomon whose only other directorial credit is the much derided board game adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons (2000), An American haunting is supposedly based on a true story which this film apparently represents reasonably well but there's very little evidence to support anything in this film or the events it's based upon being true. In fact the main inspiration for An American Haunting was the novel 'The Bell Witch: An American Haunting' by Brett Monahan first published in 1995 & was clearly written & sold as a work of fiction, not fact so that just about says all you need to know how historically factual this is. To be fair to An American Haunting it's not the worst film I have ever seen, generally speaking I don't like haunted house horror flicks that much as I find they are all the same with doors opening & closing on their own, light turning on & off & loud noises coming from dark corners that usually turn out to be Cat's or windows banging & offer little variety but An American Haunting is well made & I liked the 19th Century period setting. There's a sudden twist ending which is actually a little difficult to understand as it is in the film & I admit I had to look on the IMDb's FAQ page & have it laid out for me but it does actually make sense to me now I have had it explained, it's not the greatest twist ending & it comes from nowhere as there's no real reference or hint to it anytime before but the effort is appreciated anyway. Unfortunately the script is rather bare, it goes from one loud ghostly attack to another in quick succession without really stopping to let the story develop, the character's to react to what's going on & besides the ghostly encounters there's very little else to the film beside the final twist.Available in a theatrical PG version an an Unrated cut that significantly alters the plot, much of the text from the start & end of the film is removed distancing itself from the true story claims & there are lots of changes throughout although there is no extra violence or gore, I have based my review on the Unrated version which appears to the the most widely available. The film looks nice with impressive production design, apparently the house where the film is set is an almost identical replica of the actual Bell residence recreated from historic photo's. There's lots of CGI here, shots of Betsy being dragged across her room, lifted up & slapped around with ridiculously overdone sound effects set the tone for the entire style of the film as director Solomon has no idea how to build suspense or tension & he has never heard of the word subtle either. Every other scene seems to be an attack or a cheap scare or an encounter with a ghost.With a supposed budget of about $14,000,000 this looks nice, the production design reminded me of a cheaper Sleepy Hollow (1999) with it's woods, old wooden houses & gloomy colour palette. Filmed in Bucharest in Romania & Québec in Canada despite being set entirely in the US. The acting is fine, veterans Donald Sutherland & Sissy Spacek provide decent performances while the rest of the cast are alright.An American haunting isn't as bad as I thought it would be without exactly being great either, it's an OK haunted house horror with the advantage of a good cast, nice production values & a memorable twist ending that doesn't make perfect sense but I'll take it none the less. An American Haunting could have been better sure but it could also have been a lot worse.

With a title like, "An American Haunting", many viewers won't be surprised that Canadians were involved with its production. And knowing that Canadians were involved, they will have probably concluded that the movie is bad. And they would be right. I guess the production values are okay for a movie without a Hollywood blockbuster budget, but there is pretty much nothing else positive I can find here. The main problem is that there is almost no plot - it's just one ghost attack after another, with little to nothing to advance the story between these attacks. And the ghost attacks themselves are not the least bit scary. The filmmakers try to juice things up with frenzied camera movements and screaming, but this fails to liven these parts of the movie. And what does the modern day prologue/ending have to do with the bulk of the movie? The only interesting thing the movie teaches us is that ghosts like to repeatedly slap people in the face.