The story of the Bell Witch has long been a staple of the American ghost story. It's been one of the more infamous ghost stories throughout colonial history and even President Andrew Jackson made claims as to the legitimacy of the haunting that took place in Robertson County, Tennessee back from 1817 until 1821.

The film is told in flashback by Reverend James Johnston (played fairly well by writer/director Ric White) who, in the film at least, has been approached by two reporters looking for his take on the events that took place in the Bell house during that four year period. This sets up the framework for the film, as it cuts to the action 'as it happens' and back to Johnston for some periodic explanation/elaboration scenes. It's an effective storytelling method and it works well for this film.

Basically what happened to the Bells is this – when they took up residence in their home, some paranormal/poltergeist style activity started to happen without any logical explanation. It begins as noises, animals howling, strange voices and the like, and then begins to manifest into a more tangible form when the daughters in the family report being pinched at night, and have the covers yanked off of them while they sleep. When the activity increases, John Bell brings in his friend and the local minister, James Johnston, to get his opinion on things. Johnston agrees with Bell that the haunting is real, and many of the locals begin to take an interest in the events.

As time goes on the spirit plays tricks on the family, exposes people for lying and stealing when the come over to visit, and starts to display some very strange behavior – again, with no apparent reason or motive. The spirit shows affection towards John's wife, Lucy, but has a strange effect on his daughter Betsy and makes plain it's case for not wanting her to wed a local boy. Things take an even more sinister turn when the spirit pronounces that it will not rest or leave the family alone until John is dead…

I'm a sucker for those types of ghost stories that are 'based on actual events.' For some reason, especially when it really is based on true events (as opposed to films like the similarly titled but completely bogus Blair Witch Project) it makes things a little bit spookier to think what the people who went through this stuff must have been feeling or thinking of when it all hit the fan. Ric White does a good job of bringing the weirdness to his script and the story, though it drags in a few spots at just under two hours in length, remains pretty solid. The structure and framework is good, as are the actual set pieces in which the spectral activity manifests or makes itself known in one way or another.

Unfortunately, and you can say this about most independent features, not everything comes together as nicely as it should. Though the main performers are good, the bit players tend to ham it up and seem a little out of place against a serious story. Even more out of place against a serious story are the very inappropriate comic relief bits, mostly revolving around a chubby member of the Bell family and his late night urine festivities. Even in the hands of a skilled professional actor this probably wouldn't have worked given that the rest of the movie plays pretty straight, but here inexperience does shine through.

The film also has a few scenes in it that really should have been trimmed down. Clocking in at roughly seven minutes (maybe longer) there's a hoe-down scene that really doesn't accelerate the story, build characters, or do the movie any good at all – it is simply there and it feels like filler. With the length of the film already higher than the standard ninety minutes, filler isn't really necessary. Some better editing probably would have tightened the pacing and resulted in a more tense and frightening film, as The Bell Witch Haunting does have a great eerie premise and some truly spook moments, but sadly it's just a little bit too rough around the edges.

Video:

The non-anamorphic 1.66.1 image was shot on digital video and as such, it exhibits some of the flaws associated with that format – most notably, compression artifacts. There are scenes where the black levels dance around in the background, and the DVD does not reproduce the dark colors as consistently as it should. The disc came with a note attached saying that some people were having issues with the movie looking too dark and that it was shot this way on purpose – I didn't experience any issues in that regard, and I felt that the absolute blackness of a few specific scenes worked well for the film. But those compression artifacts are ugly, there's no getting around it. Edge enhancement is present but not dominating, and there overall image quality isn't half bad for a low budget indy film, it's just a shame more couldn't have been done with the black levels during the authoring process.