Writer-director Courtney Solomon faced one scary proposition when he debuted his Tennessee-set ghost story, "An American Haunting," for a hometown crowd at the Nashville Film Festival last month. Now he's up against another: opening his movie against the Tom Cruise juggernaut, "Mission: Impossible III."
"We're counterprogramming," Solomon says optimistically.
"An American Haunting" tells the story of the Bell Witch, a widely reported case in which the government acknowledged that the supernatural caused a man's death. Based on events that happened in Adams, Tenn., in the 19th century, the tale has a worldwide following.
Although the film has played at a few festivals and opened in the United Kingdom three weeks ago, the version that is hitting screens here now is somewhat different.
"I recut the film because there were a lot of things I wanted to do for the U.S. version," Solomon says by phone from Los Angeles.
Solomon originally hoped to shoot "An American Haunting," which stars Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland, Rachel Hurd-Wood ("Peter Pan") and James D'Arcy ("Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World"), in Tennessee, but he ran into a major obstacle.
"In the countryside, there was no place I could find where I could rebuild the farm, so to speak, where there weren't telephone poles everywhere," he says. "Believe it or not, that's a big deal. ... I ended up having to go all the way to Romania to re-create Tennessee."
Solomon, who directed 2000's "Dungeons & Dragons" (and prefers not to discuss that), was looking for a ghost story to turn into a movie when he discovered the Bell Witch, a mischievous and terrifying entity said to have plagued the Bell family for years until driving one Bell to his death. Solomon found Brent Monahan's book, "An American Haunting," and was hooked by the story.
"I certainly know my fair share about the Bell Witch legend," he says. "I really don't want to mess with it at all. I tried to give it as accurate a representation as I could, and I hope it respects that."
Solomon is no skeptic when it comes to hauntings.
"I definitely believe in ghosts, that there's something out there and there's another plane of existence," he says. "I don't know exactly what it is, but I definitely believe in certain aspects of the supernatural. That's why I went after doing some sort of movie like this."
Now he suspects life may be imitating art. While he's been busy trying to finish and promote the film, strange things have been happening at his home in Los Angeles. His wife has told him of alarms going off in rooms that no one is in.
"Yesterday she was sitting downstairs, and the front door just swung open out of nowhere, like, really, really fast," he says. "She called me, freaking out. She said the dogs were barking at nothing. She thinks there's a ghost in the house."
The Toronto-born Solomon grew up on the sets of such films as "Mrs. Soffel" and "The Dream Team." His mother, now retired, was a production coordinator on movies and "tons" of TV shows, and Solomon got his start in the film biz doing all sorts of odd jobs on sets.
He still hasn't decided what he's doing next.
"There are a lot of scary films on my desk," he says.
Source: http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?a ... R-05-05-06
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