FAR FROM A HEAD-TURNER

REVIEWED - AN AMERICAN HAUNTING: With a few notable exceptions - The Shining, The Innocents - attempts to make something respectable out of the horror film have generally resulted in failure. When tidied up and stripped of their anti-social tendencies, such entertainments can come across like those awful quasi-classical arrangements of rock songs that kept the London Symphony Orchestra afloat during the 1970s.

An American Haunting, whose pompously definitive title hints at the tedium to come, illustrates the dangers of such exercises quite nicely. Courtney Solomon's film, adapted from a book by Brent Monahan, focuses on a case of witchcraft purported to have occurred in Tennessee some 200 years ago. Records show that one John Bell, a wealthy farmer, received unhappy supernatural visitations after rubbing up a local witch the wrong way. Establishing conventions that would, centuries later, be followed by William Friedkin and Roman Polanski, mysterious entities began by making noises in the attic before taking indecent possession of the family's eldest daughter.

The picture features such big, serious actors as Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek. It is shot on the sort of fastidiously constructed - but patently unlived in - sets one might expect to encounter at a folk park. It eschews sensation for a careful reconstruction of the events as told by contemporaneous sources. It is, for the most part, as dull as rice pudding with no raisins.

The lack of excitement stems, mainly, from the film's unnecessary fidelity to the alleged facts. Terrified of dealing too heavily in supposition, Solomon, director of the amusingly terrible Dungeons and Dragons, is forced to repeat the same manifestations of possession over and over again. If young Rachel Hurd-Wood, impressive as the poor girl, claws the floorboards once, she claws them a hundred times.

An American Haunting has two endings. One supposes itself to have a big idea; the other, closing off a contemporary framing sequence, deals in vulgar shock techniques. You can probably guess which is more enjoyable.