Something terrifying happened to the Bell family of Red River, Tennessee, nearly 200 years ago. Those horrifying occurrences in and around their home have been recounted by numerous scholars and paranormal experts, making it the most documented haunting in American history. It is, to date, the only case ever recorded in the United States where a spirit caused the death of a human being, and it remains to this day an unsolved mystery… Until now.
Ascending filmmaker Courtney Solomon writes, produces and directs a shocking vision of one family’s battle against forces of the dark—and their struggle to illuminate secrets that threaten to destroy them all—in the chilling psychological horror film AN AMERICAN HAUNTING…a project that recalls some of the cinema’s memorable explorations of encounters between the seen and unseen worlds, such as the 1960’s “Carnival of Souls” and “The Haunting” and the 1970’s “The Exorcist.”
“The time has finally come to tell you the truth of our family’s dark secret and the horrors you suffered as a young girl…”
For filmmaker Solomon, the dark side has always held a fascination. The up-andcoming director chose for the subject of his second feature film a story that had literally been haunting listeners and readers for two centuries—the tale of the “Bell Witch.” But rather than just retelling the story of the Bells as handed down through record and legend, Solomon (as triple hat wearer writer/director/producer) turned to a book by respected horror novelist Brent Monahan entitled The Bell Witch: An American Haunting. Solomon was determined to incorporate validated accounts of what took place in the Bell home and dovetail those with the treatise presented by Monahan as being the root cause of the paranormal activity that tortured Betsy Bell and her family…in short, to end up with a plausible reality and one that offers a compelling story with a surprising and shocking twist.
Solomon offers, “There are certain aspects of the screenplay that do follow the original legend itself, which I felt was important to try to stay true to, because it’s historically documented, and there are many people that take it seriously. As far as the ending and what happens to Betsy Bell, that was something that was unique to the book and the author of the book, Brent Monahan. He had come up with that, and it was something that I felt was a believable cause—because essentially, it is an unsolved mystery. Our film is really one version, one representation, of what may have been the cause of that mystery.”
The haunting visited upon the Bells is customarily referred to as poltergeist activity—epitomized by noises, the moving of objects and the often violent assaults on those present. The possible core reason for the family’s trauma—as put forth by Monahan and Solomon—is supported by Dr. Nandor Fodor, a lawyer and journalist who dedicated his life to the study of psychic phenomenon in the mid-20th Century. Fodor once theorized that poltergeist activity was directly related to the personal problems of the subject at the center of the “haunting.” Others believe that poltergeists are the directed energy originating in a person’s mind—often an adolescent girl’s—brought about by some type of emotional or psychological trauma. All of these theories would point to Betsy as the origin of the haunting and support the plausible reality created in the film.
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