Movie Review: THE HOPEWELL HAUNTING

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: June 13th, 2023 / 01:46 AM

THE HOPEWELL HAUNTING movie poster | ©2023 Dark Sky Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Ted Ferguson, Tim Morton, Audra Todd, Rich Williams, Jennifer Feldspausch, Erin Strange, Tom Morton, Cody Clark, Stacey Gillespie
Writer: Dane Sears
Director: Dane Sears
Distributor: Dark Sky Films
Release Date: June 13, 2023 (VOD, digital)

According to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, Kentucky pastor Walter Howell gave an interview to paranormal investigator Simon Coots in 1953. The interview concerned an incident in September 1934, when Howell spent the night trying to debunk rumors of a haunted house, only to emerge convinced that the haunting was real.

In 2007, Dane Sears directed and co-wrote a short, THE HOPEWELL HAUNTING, based on this. Sears has now written and directed a feature version with the same title.

We’re in rural Kentucky in the 1930s. Although the rooms in the empty house have no visible signs of life, we hear running, screaming, and sounds of violence.

At a whitewashed church, local Pastor James (Ted Ferguson) enters to find a couple asleep on one of the pews. These are Newt Fryman (Tim Morton) and his wife Ollie (Audra Todd).

Newt explains they’re new to the area and have been given a house, but there’s something wrong with it and they can’t stay there. Pastor James doesn’t want them to stay in his church, either. To placate Newt, he reluctantly agrees to go to the house and say a blessing.

It’s daytime and the Pastor stays in the entry hall. Even here, he finds mysterious messages on the wall. A few incidents later, Pastor James wants to extricate himself from the whole situation. He is shamed into returning to the house by Newt’s boss, influential town resident Judge Charles Pierce (Rich Williams). This time, Pastor James spends the night.

Sears gets a good period feel from his actors and from the production design (although the pastor’s kitchen floor looks shinier than what we’d expect from a small-town home in the ‘30s).

Writing-wise, it also makes sense that nobody has much information about the house’s history. Sears shows us enough social interaction for us to understand that between the isolation, everybody’s desire to mind their own business, and the fact that documentation just wasn’t what it is today.

However, in Sears’s evident and understandable desire to make THE HOPEWELL HAUNTING seem like something that really could have happened, he often gets on the wrong side of the realism line.

Yes, people can be inarticulate and sit around immobilized for long periods while trying to decide what to do. It’s credible, but not dynamic.

Further, because Pastor James is such an unsympathetic figure at the start, we aren’t as afraid for him as we ought to be. He’s so bad at his ministerial job, lacking compassion or an instinct to be helpful, that THE HOPEWELL HAUNTING actually puts us on the side the rich judge when he flexes his power to get the pastor to do something.

Ferguson does well in his performance, but he can’t make Pastor James compelling enough to see us through to a payoff that feels less cinematic than we’d like.

THE HOPEWELL HAUNTING may be best suited for viewers who’d be genuinely excited to listen to the radio interview that inspired the film.

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