The Reel Review
Alleged real-life hauntings of a college dormitory in upstate New York and a Victorian-style house in Utah, featuring priests, clairvoyants and even ties to famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, are explored in this Netflix paranormal horror docu-series from executive producer James Wan (The Conjuring).
The first three of the five half-hour episodes, Eerie Hall, are about a ghost that terrorized college student Chris DiCesare and his friends in 1984 at SUNY’s Geneseo campus in upstate New York. Wan’s fingerprints are all over the story, which features exceptionally well-done, movie-quality re-enactments and compelling, emotional interviews with DiCesare and others impacted by the haunting. Admirably, it goes for empathy instead of exploitation in detailing how the spine-tingling experiences affected the students’ mental health. The second story, This House Murdered Me, captures the despair and growing panic of a family terrorized in the mid-2000s in their home near Salt Lake City. It is a bit more uneven, at least until the last few minutes of the series.
The endings of each of the two stories do ultimately yield explanations behind the alleged hauntings. And the actual footage of the clairvoyant trying to rid the house of its multitude of ghosts in Episode Five is pretty fascinating, reminiscent of the clairvoyant Tangina in the 1982 classic, Poltergeist. Interestingly enough, what makes True Haunting so good as a horror series overshadows its real-life documentary element, which is less about ghosts and more about people wanting to be believed.
REEL FACTS
• Chris DiCesare says the meeting with paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren happened exactly as portrayed in the series and that the ghostly sightings in his dorm ultimately stopped after a priest came to bless the dorm and exorcise the spirit. Students at SUNY Geneseo, however, believe Erie Hall remains haunted to this day.
• Canadian-born Wyatt Dorion, who stars of this first three episodes of re-enactments in True Haunting, appears as Black Hole in the Amazon Prime superhero series Gen V. He is also a model and bodybuilder.
• The story The House That Murdered Me was previously featured in the 2006 series A Haunting.
Video & Photo
