Where are my series of emojis? I need "eh", "sigh" and finally, snooze.Look, poltergeist/haunting/possession movies are old hat in my opinion. You'd have to be extremely creative to make something from that genre be fresh, new and compelling. "An American Haunting" was not.The setting is Tennessee year 1817 and a teenage girl is being harassed by an entity. The family cannot rid themselves of this specter no matter what measures they take. The movie plays out as you would expect with slow build up and a plethora of jump scares (that were anything but--jump annoyances is more accurate).I patiently suffered through this movie to await the big reveal. Yes, the movie had something of a twist in store but not the least bit satisfying. I will be haunted by this movie and the decision I made to watch it.

A divorced mother is living in the woods with her daughter suffering from nightmares. She finds a letter from 1848 by the previous occupant recounting the tale of the Bell Witch. It's 1817 Red River, Tennessee. The church finds John Bell (Donald Sutherland) of usury for charging 20% interest against rumored witch Kate Batts. However Batts doesn't get her expected reciprocity and vows revenge on him and his beloved daughter Betsy (Rachel Hurd-Wood).It looks good but there are few scares. The jump scares come with regularity which only makes it less scary. It's a lot of loud surprise noises and horror soundtrack. Sutherland and Sissy Spacek seem to be slumming it here in this one. This could work with Rachel Hurd-Wood front and center. Instead the movie starts with another girl in a different time period. It takes awhile to get to her and the movie keeps going back to the veterans. The reveal is problematic and a little bit confusing. This is a fair ghost story but it isn't scary.

For the most part it's an average haunted house movie with decent actors but that ending actually made me annoyed at having wasted over an hour and a half of my life on this. Remember that feeling you got when you watched the last episode of 'Lost'? Well that's the feeling right there, only at least in this case in exchange for less wasted time.So ghosts hurt and rape a girl, they do this in front of witnesses whilst the girl levitates etc. The ghosts also take a a tree out to keep the girl from leaving the home. They also hurt her father.Despite all of this it turns our that her father was the one hurting her, raping etc. The twist at the ending I think was supposed to be that the girl created the ghost herself to protect her from her father. This is the same ghost that for most of the movie is beating the crap out of her.Not to mention the fact that multiple witnesses watched the girl being raped by thin air. Only for the directors to seemingly forget this later on, no guys nobody saw her being raped by a ghost, it was her father! It was just a trick of the light kept us from seeing him.Disjointed, contradictory and very much not worth wasting your time on. It's a good job we have piracy, there was a time you'd have to pay to watch this rubbish.

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.