Avoid this film at all costs.

Actually, that’s a bit harsh. It’s not terrible but it’s just not very good. An American Haunting is a film version of the allegedly true events that took place in the early 19th century, apparently witnessed by President Andrew Jackson himself (although that doesn’t feature in the film). It’s been adapted by Canadian filmmaker Courtney Solomon who wrote, produced and directed the film. His directing C.V. basically reads “Dungeons and Dragons” (yes, that diabolically bad film with Jeremy Irons hamming it up) and this. I wish I had known that before I started.

The directing is passable. I will admit to jumping a couple of times (even once at a cheap hand on shoulder fright) but that was not so much down to a masterly build up of tension as the musical score and the crashing violins that were put to fairly good effect. The rest of the directing is pretty much the same - lots of ghost (or “entity” as they call it) POV shots that fly around the room buzzing the occupants who all do their best to look askance and perturbed and plenty of colour fade outs to bleached shots or black and white. Either that or my DVD player is on the blink. The problem is that that’s all there was and it wasn’t enough to sustain any suspense. I know Robert Rodriguez has got this thing about “don’t ever keep the camera still” but I think you have to at times. Otherwise you spend too much time trying to take in new information and in a suspense film this is counter productive. You need to be subtle and the camera direction in this film was anything but.

The writing also suffered from repetition. There was no escalating conflict, merely the same “girl gets abused by ghost - again” or “witnesses witness ghost again”. If there were any subplots, I missed them. The increase in terror and threat - I think - came from the fact that the ghost started off by being silent and then it started speaking. As for any final showdown or confrontation - forget about it. The explanation comes after absolutely no effort on the part of any of the characters (or perhaps very little effort on the part of Donald Sutherland’s character.) It’s like “Why are we being haunted so?” “You know why!” “Oh yeah, so we do. I’d totally forgotten about that!” followed by a collective slapping of heads and a “Of course!” Oh, and the story is all told as narration that’s the diary of one of the characters being read by some women in modern times. I have absolutely no idea what that was all about!

And spooky little girls with long dark hair? So done to death (no pun intended)!

The only redeeming thing about the whole film were the performances. Donald Sutherland is always watchable and Sissy Spacek gave a good turn as his wife. The supporting cast fulfilled their aghast and dumbfounded expressions adequately and, well, that was about it. All in all, not a terrible film - just not particularly good.