Harriet often sits upright on the couch, with her paws on her belly, like a little old man watching television. This time, her left paw was strategically placed, which cracked me up, so I got out the camera.
Instant Review: An American Haunting
Ms. Lea, D, and I went to see An American Haunting last night. I just wanted to see a movie–it didn’t matter which one, as long as Tom Cruise wasn’t in it. I like horror and ghost stories, so An American Haunting sounded good to me.
It is allegedly based on a true story, and I had done a little reading ahead of time on the story and various explanations for what had happened. The first 2/3 of the movie seemed to follow the general storyline fairly faithfully: The father pisses off a neighbor in a land deal gone wrong. The neighbor is thought to be a witch. She curses the family. When a series of strange occurrences plague the family, they blame the neighborhood witch. Most of the haunting involves tormenting of the family’s daughter, then, later, the father.
But then, the movie took a bizarre right turn. Instead of the common assumption that the neighbor was responsible for the haunting, the movie storyline involved the father molesting the daughter, who then had some sort of psychotic/supernatural split. It was the daughter who was responsible for the haunting. Why she would have spent years tormenting herself is a mystery to me. Perhaps it was a passive-aggressive way to get back at her father? In any event, the daughter does end up getting her revenge on her father, by goading her mother into poisoning him. After the father’s death, the haunting ceases.
I didn’t get obsessive about doing pre-movie research, so I could’ve missed some theories, but nowhere did I come across a father-molesting-daughter theory. And, while there was some set-up for that conclusion, it ended up feeling abrupt, like it had been tacked on at the last minute.
I do wonder if the daughter might have been epileptic. In the early 1800s, when the haunting took place, it was thought that epileptics were possessed by spirits. Exorcism was a common “treatment” for the disease. It may have been preferable to make one’s community believe you are the victim of a haunting than to admit that your daughter was possessed by evil spirits. Someone with epilepsy might have been blamed for all sorts of bad happenings, so deflecting the blame onto a neighbor would have been a stroke of PR genius.
red paper boat 