By David Dent
While this documentary stretches the definition of the word ‘uncommon’ (some of the content featured is pretty well known) and confines itself to the New England states, this is nonetheless an entertaining and good-looking whistle stop tour around haunted eastern America.
Giorgio Clementelli directs, narration is by Mark Hanna and the ‘host’ (who remains silent) is the enigmatic Alex Di Nunzio, who nicks Rod Serling’s shtick from Night Gallery, by wandering round staring at artworks that introduce the next ‘true’ story.
USoAH starts off well, introducing us to famous houses in Havershaw NY (the architectural inspiration for the Psycho house), a certain timber clad residence in Amity, Long Island, and the home of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (which, although now abandoned, still houses their museum of spooky artefacts).
Clementelli then takes us to New York City, with film locations used in Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel and Ghostbusters, then further out to Staten Island and the NoBeBoSco campsite in the Kittatinny Mountains area of New Jersey, used for Friday 13th (still incredibly intact).
But just when the viewer is settling down for a fascinating movie location tour, things go a bit generic with segments about the Salem witch trials, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe and the Jersey Devil, which is a bit of a shame, as up to then we were covering the ‘road less travelled’.
Clementelli nicely sidesteps the thorny issues of photo rights (there are no film clips in this doc) by having a team of technical people manipulate images; and doing a pretty good job of it. This makes the whole thing feel less like a standard doc and turns it into something a bit more personal. Some of the photo choices are a little suspect taste wise and I wasn’t sure just who the audience would be for this, but if you don’t know much about spooky (eastern) US history, you could do worse than spend some time with this documentary.
Bloody Flicks 