'AMERICAN HAUNTING' SCARES UP SOME CREEPINESS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

It's based on true events, ``validated by the State of Tennessee as the only case in U.S. history where a spirit or entity caused the death of a human being,'' as the movie's press materials so carefully phrase it.

But ``An American Haunting'' - a handsome, often scary and finally jumbled ghost story - is also just one guy's idea of what might have really happened: novelist Brent Monahan, whose theories ``Haunting's'' writer-director Courtney Solomon (``Dungeons & Dragons'') says he supports. They seem as good as any others to me, by evidence of the film. But I still don't buy any of it, regardless of what the State of Tennessee says.

Believe it or don't, Solomon has nonetheless made a pretty good, Hammer Studios-style 19th-century horror film. And, like the title says, there are some nicely observed American characteristics worked in (the director is from Canada, and most of this was shot in Romania), especially when it comes to how religion and frontier capitalism might have influenced the characters' pre-Freudian worldviews. The late Adrian Biddle's wintry cinematography adds appropriately creepy and feral touches to the proceedings.

But by the end I couldn't tell what was happening to whom, or if it happened at all - there are so many dream sequences, hallucinations and repetitive fright cues that by the time the whole shebang is (dubiously) explained for us, logic seems beside the point.

Anyway, what happened was that the happy family of John Bell (Donald Sutherland) suffered a poltergeist infestation from 1818 to 1820, after he'd more or less swindled a neighbor, widely considered to be a witch, in a land deal.

The main wrath of the spirit was directed at John's adolescent daughter Betsy (English actress Rachel Hurd-Wood). The invisible entity would slap her around, drag her by her hair and otherwise remorselessly molest her. Some cadaverous apparition of a younger girl was also involved (the movie sort of explains that), and there appeared to be a werewolf on board, too (never explicated).

Anyway, neither Christian exorcisms nor Enlightenment rationalism had any effect on the monster. The movie makes a case for a very extreme form of mother love, though. ``Carrie'' herself, Sissy Spacek, plays the intuitive Mrs. Bell.

The main story is framed by modern-day antics involving Bell descendents. These suggest the real curse comes from genetic predisposition rather than a truly supernatural place. If the rest of ``An American Haunting'' hadn't been so set on acting like an otherworldly ghost movie, this may have been convincing.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

AN AMERICAN HAUNTING - Two and one half stars

(PG-13: violence, sex, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, Rachel Hurd-Wood, James D'Arcy.

Director: Courtney Solomon.

Running time: 1 hr. 24 min.

In a nutshell: Period possession story, purportedly based on true events, has good production values, a classy cast and the same kind of narrative incoherence that haunts cheap contemporary horror movies.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

``An American Haunting,'' based on a purportedly true occurrence, stars Sissy Spacek as the wife of a man whose home is infested by poltergeists in early-1800s Tennessee.