Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production. The canned creeps begin with a present-day framing story, as a terrorized young woman runs through snow-banked Tennessee woods back to the house where a family, the Bells, were harassed by an unruly poltergeist beginning in 1817. Told in flashback through the diary of mother Lucy Bell (Sissy Spacek), this “true account” of the Bell Witch haunting offers an encyclopedic rehash of spook films new and old, dressed out in murky period detail. The Bells’ daughter, Betsy (Rachel Hurd-Wood), bears the brunt of the angry specter’s wrath, with so much of the film devoted to her prolonged physical thrashings that it feels like watching a scene from The Exorcist stuck on a loop. A literal “ghost cam” that swoops and weaves around the heads of family and friends, including Betsy’s father (Donald Sutherland) and schoolteacher (James D’Arcy), seems like a gimmick lifted from William Castle. Director Courtney Solomon (Dungeons & Dragons) even imports the creepy spectral children who’ve been all the rage in recent Japanese horror films. So much for homegrown haunts.