Like many horror movies, An American Haunting has a universal message that audiences can apply to their own lives: Don't charge exorbitant interest when doing business with a suspected witch. Duded out like the Quaker Oatmeal Man, Donald Sutherland learns this the hard way when he charges a spooky neighbor with a sideline in the dark arts slightly more interest than church law allows, making himself, his home, and his family the subjects of a good old-fashioned haunting. What's next? A fright flick about a man who suffers the torments of the damned after slightly underpaying his taxes?
Courtney Solomon's little-anticipated follow-up to Dungeons & Dragons is based on what it bills as the most documented case of haunting and spirit-world chicanery in American history. Which begs the question, why document it again? The film offers no real answer beyond the surprisingly strong box-office of the similarly fact-based, equally churchy The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. Plagued by one of cheesiest framing sequences in recent memory, An American Haunting begins in the present, with one of Sutherland's descendents reading a letter warning of the bad juju and freaky spirits haunting the family home. The film then flashes back to the early 19th century, where Sutherland and daughter Rachel Hurd-Wood are plagued by poltergeists, beasties, ghouls, demons, and all sorts of things that go bump in the night.
The problem with movies about possessing spirits and poltergeists post-The Exorcist is that their demons tend to behave like bratty children, throwing things, making messes, and enraging authority figures. Without a grounding in concrete reality, these demonic tantrums invariably come across as silly rather than scary, and An American Haunting is never remotely frightening. Not even the gravity Sutherland and Sissy Spacek bring to their roles can keep the film from sinking into camp early on. It's never an encouraging sign when a horror movie based on a true story fatally lacks the verisimilitude of, say, Alone In The Dark. Then again, how much authenticity can you really expect from a movie that's called An American Haunting, but was largely filmed in Romania?