Courtney Solomon's "An American Haunting" has a built-in problem for a horror movie: It's based on a popular early 19th- century legend billed as the only "recorded case of a spirit causing the death of a human being."

For anyone aware of this poltergeist tale, or who bothers to look it up, the victim's identity will come as no surprise, and a horror movie without a surprise is no horror movie at all.

Even those who go in cold - as I did - will quickly narrow the list of potential victims, so the inevitable death scene has very little impact.

Having said that, there are jolts galore in a movie stuffed with the basic tricks of the evil-spirit trade - banging noises in the attic, slamming doors and windows, spinning clocks, shaking beds, rabid beasts, disappearing children and the occasional moment of eyeball-rolling possession.

The wheels of this far-fetched yarn, recalled in notes found by a child living in the same house more than 200 years later, are set in motion when John Bell (Donald Sutherland), the patriarch of a Tennessee farm family, is convicted by his church elders of having taken advantage of a widowed neighbor in an 1817 land deal.

Unsatisfied by her church victory, Kate Batts (Gaye Brown) curses Bell and his family, promising particular grief for him and his blossoming teenage daughter Betsy (Rachel Hurd-Ward).

Before long, Bell; his wife, Lucy (Sissy Spacek); their son, John Jr. (Thom Fell); their Bible-bearing, brandy-gulping family friend (Matthew Marsh), and schoolteacher Richard Powell (James D'Arcy) are trying to drive away the invisible spirits that drag Betsy around by the hair and smack her across the face.

Despite its short, 84-minute running time, "An American Haunting" repeats these scenes so many times you'll wish Solomon veered from the source novel and killed off a few more people, just for variety. Instead, he's relying on the purported truth of the story - which inspired the much more daring "Blair Witch Project" a few years ago - to lure moviegoers who are either willing to suspend their disbelief or are convinced the story is more history than legend.

Old pros Sutherland and Spacek are certainly convincing, but young Hurd-Wood, Wendy Darling in P.J. Hogan's "Peter Pan," steals the show as a kid whose parents don't have the sense to move her out of a haunted bedroom.