The haunting of a 19th century Tennessee clan gets old fast, even when the spirit is presented as a psychological aberration.
By: Bob Brown
Put an impressionable young girl in a creaky, spooky house on the edge of nowhere, toss in mysterious noises, things that go bump in the night, and an irresistible force who flings people and furniture around the room. Then stir all liberally and, voila you have the formula for this film and dozens of others.
Like the recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), this film is purportedly based on actual events and real people, whose frightening experience has become a legend. Unlike Emily Rose, however, the protagonist, young Betsy Bell, is not a fictionalized pseudonym. She and the Bell family, including her parents John and Lucy Bell and their four sons, farmed a plantation in what is now Robertson County, Tenn.
In this film, the story is set within a frame tale. A frightened girl is running through the Tennessee woods to escape something. When she reaches home, her mother comforts her, but she finds that her daughter has retrieved an old doll and a dusty manuscript from the attic. (It looks like the same old doll that Dakota Fanning was lugging around in a similar "ghost" story, Hide and Seek.) Warning her daughter away from the attic, the mother sits down to read the ancient papers and the tale unfolds. The story is true to what is known to a point. The Bells’ real experience goes something like this.
Around 1817, the elder John Bell encountered the first of many visits from a malevolent spirit, who continued to torment his family and anyone who tried to help them. At first fixing on John Bell, the spirit turned on the children, Betsy in particular. It reportedly punched and slapped her, pulled off her bedclothes in the night, and scattered objects around the room. The torments continued for years, until John Bell was stricken by a mysterious illness, to which he succumbed in 1820.
Some believed it was the curse of a witch, the "Bell Witch" as it came to be called. A neighbor who hated the Bells was suspect. Betsy’s young schoolteacher was another under a cloud. Whatever it was a witch, a poltergeist, the effects of undercooked possum was never satisfactorily explained. Its voice promised to return and haunt Bell descendants for generations.
The Bell legend has been done to death in no fewer than 15 books and two other feature-length films. Director Courtney Solomon’s movie is based on the novelization by Brent Monahan, The Bell Witch: An American Haunting (1997). Little can be said that’s new. The twist this time is that Solomon’s script presents the haunting as a psychological aberration. But not before he’s spent over an hour showing it as the old-fashioned ghost story it is. Why spoil the fun just to make the inexplicable plausible?
From the Bells’ isolated farm, and a nearby one-room schoolhouse, there’s not much change of scenery for a restless spirit up to no good. The knockings, the thumps, the creaking doors have had their effect early on. The tedium of the haunting gets old fast. Even M. Night Shyamalan would have found a way to vary the menu.
One irony about this "American" haunting is that there’s apparently not enough left of pristine Tennessee woodlands to have shot the movie there. Like Cold Mountain, this film found its settings in Romania. Not a bad place to make a horror film at that, but it’s a shame that it’s easier and cheaper to find locations just about anywhere else than where the stories happened. Canada, another popular location, has become Everywhere, U.S.A., for American filmmakers.
Still, Mr. Solomon’s casting crew was able to rustle up the likes of Donald Sutherland (John Bell), Sissy Spacek (Lucy Bell), James D’Arcy (schoolmaster Richard Powell) and Rachel Hurd-Wood (Betsy) in the key roles. And they do a creditable job with the material. It’s just that the material doesn’t stretch them to the full extent of their talents. It’s a kind of blessing that the special effects crew has a light hand. Although not as bare bones as, say The Blair Witch Project, the story is allowed to develop through the accretion of disturbances that are mostly heard. What is seen is the family’s fear and, in one instance, a wolf.
It would be simply a ghost story without any resolution, except for the connection with the frame story’s contemporary mother and daughter. They tie off Solomon’s film as if to explain what poltergeists are and how they are often seen by girls of this age who are in emotional turmoil. That emotional turmoil is another scary story in itself, but it doesn’t make the Bell legend any scarier; it just adds a bizarre and unnecessary twist to a spooky tale better told around the campfire or on chill autumn nights nigh onto Halloween.
Rated PG-13 for intense terror sequences and thematic material.

