Well, it finally happened. Here I am, into middle age, and a movie comes along that gives me the first real live chill up the back of my neck.<\/p>\n
I’m a pretty jaded horror movie buff. Blood and guts? No problem.\u00a0 Takes a lot to make me squirm. I’ve seen all the big ones and a lot of the little ones, and I’ve never experienced the actual chill<\/em> that I’ve heard about for so long. That is until I watched An American Haunting<\/em>.<\/p>\n I feel I have an advantage as a movie viewer because I lived in Japan for 3 years, and during that time became completely disconnected from American pop culture. There are dozens of movies about which I know nothing. That’s good when you want to go in with an open mind.<\/p>\n An American Haunting <\/em>stars Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek. They play the parents of an early 19th century family in Tennessee. Their daughter Betsy, played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, is tormented by a terrifying entity. The entity might have been summoned as part of curse placed on the family by a neighborhood witch.<\/p>\n This is an interesting period piece that portrays life in the pre-Civil War South as a bit different than Gone with the Wind, <\/em>and it was interesting to see a film with the guts–in this uber-Politically Correct age–to portray slaves as something besides oppressed victims of the White Man.<\/p>\n That chill I felt when the … oh, never mind. It was something I’ll remember for a while. I just wish more horror movies were able to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n