Haunting Mockumentary Reaches New Lows

September 23, 2002

With A Haunting in Georgia, the docudrama/mockumentary* genre reaches new lows, both in its credulous treatment of the paranormal and in the way it further muddles the already-murky truth standards of the re-enactment documentary form.

The story. An Ellerslie, Ga., family claims to be undergoing extended hauntings at their home. At age three, Heidi Wyrick met a stranger she called "Mr. Gordy," who became her constant companion. No one else could see him; the family took years to decide that Mr. Gordy was more than Heidi's imaginary friend. At six and a half, Heidi awoke with apparent claw marks on her cheek. A year later her father Andy woke up with similar gashes on his torso. Meanwhile the visions continued: not just Mr. Gordy, but a man with a severed hand and a shadowy figure with a hooded face. Mr. Gordy and the one-handed man were discovered to be long-dead past residents of the area: how could Heidi have known anything about them? Unsolved Mysteries did a piece on the Wyricks in 1994. Heidi's sixteen now, and the visions are still coming. Her younger sister and her mother, Lisa, sometimes see things too. Amazingly, the family never moved. Instead they went to parapsychologist William Roll, who chalked up the apparitions to "place memories" triggered by positive ions produced by a nearby earthquake fault. The makers present this as a "scientific" explanation! Dissatisfied with Roll's counsel, the family consulted psychic Amy Allen, who detected several spirits, one of them evil, another a "protector." Finally, after almost a decade of manifestations, the Bible-believing Wyricks thought to involve their church, undergoing a bargain basement exorcism while New Dominion's cameras rolled.

A Haunting in Georgia purports to tell the Wyricks' story as a two-hour mockumentary. New Dominion crews spent fifteen days filming the family and picking up background shots. Like the same producers' Discovery series The New Detectives and The FBI Files, Haunting relies heavily on fictionalized re-enactments. Purists decried the technique when shows like Unsolved Mysteries pioneered it, but it's become depressingly standard today. As New Dominion's police procedurals show, historical accuracy (which, admittedly, can get expensive) is a low priority: The FBI Files famously re-creates crime investigations from the 1970s in which agents have 17" Gateway monitors on their desks, use cell phones, and drive Dodge Intrepids. Still, the form retains a rule or two, especially this one: give viewers enough clues to know when they're viewing a re-enactment and when they're viewing the real participants. On The FBI Files, the fully-dramatized cinematic segments are clearly re-enactments with actors, while present-day commentaries by actual participants are shot news-style, with superimposed titles identifying their talking heads. (Usually you can't persuade the actual participants to stoop so low as to re-enact themselves.) Episodes usually close with mug shots of the actual offenders, whom viewers can compare to the actors who portrayed them.

That's the last vestige of cinematic veracity that still adheres to the making of made-for-cable documentaries, and A Haunting in Georgia throws it in the compost heap. The entire program was shot in a uniform fictionalized cinematic style, with actual participants and re-enactors mixed so wantonly that you can't tell them apart without a scorecard. Unfortunately, this being a cable show, the scorecard (the end titles) flashed by too fast to read. But there were a couple of screenfuls of credited re-enactors - this despite the fact that most Wyrick family members played themselves. Most footage was apparently shot at the actual Wyrick home where the manifestations allegedly took place. And that's part of the problem - with the Wyricks re-enacting their alleged experiences of ten years ago, seven years ago, and a couple of months ago, and all of it shot in a uniform style, it's impossible to guess where reality lets off and the fictionalizing begins. Obviously little Heidi at age three and age six had to be played by child actresses. But the others? Was it the real William Roll or an actor? The real psychic, or an impersonator? There's no way to tell. The talking heads and the re-enactors are the same people, and no one gets an identifying super that would say, "Okay, viewers, this is the real Amy Allen."

With this departure from established mockumentary technique, viewers lose their last platform, however rickety, from which to tease perhaps more-reliable participants' claims from the less plausible re-enactments. Ironically, it may serve to degrade the program's verisimilitude. Viewing A Haunting in Georgia without any advance research, I assumed that everyone on-screen was a re-enactor. Only after some Web research did I learn that the makers had shot so much footage at the Wyrick home with the real Wyricks. And only then did I begin to consider that it might have been the real William Roll, the real Amy Allen, and so on. Haunting's makers have actually managed to underplay the most unique aspect of their production, its unusually lavish access to actual settings and participants.

I don't think the folks at New Dominion mind. It's pretty clear that they hunger to move out of the documentary "ghetto" and into something more filmic. Haunting feels less like a re-enactment documentary than a TV-movie with heavy voice-overs - a cross between Blair Witch Project told in the third person and The Amityville Horror on an even lower effects budget.

Sadly, another casualty of this final step beyond documentary form is that the makers felt no obligation to include critical comments by skeptics. In Haunting's two solid hours, the broad assumption that hauntings happen is never challenged. The narrator intones breathtaking claims like "Science has proven that strong geomagnetic fields are associated with ghosts"** without a questioning rebuttal, or even a backward glance.

Whatever one may think of the Wyrick family, average viewers can't help but come away with the impression that ghost-hunting of the Hanz Holzer magnetometer-held-high school has a solid scientific basis. And oh yeah, psychics work too.

Haunting passes faster if you keep a mental catalogue of the numerous anachronisms and continuity flubs. Mother Lisa Wyrick doesn't age a day -no effort was made to change her appearance or wardrobe for the scenes set when daughter Heidi was a child. Then again, maybe Lisa stays youthful because she's so thrifty - the camera keeps poking into the parents' bedroom: Lisa's worn the same plaid nightshirt for almost a decade. Maybe that's what drew her to Dr. Roll, who visited Heidi as a child and returned years later, still wearing exactly the same late-1990s sportcoat, dark-colored shirt, and tie.

Despite its ludicrous aspects, A Haunting in Georgia merits skeptics' serious concern - and the attention of anyone who cares about the documentary form's power to transmit genuine knowledge (or harmful misinformation). Haunting presents highly questionable paranormal claims as fact, and does so in a "newish" way that will discourage many viewers from expecting any skeptical rejoinder, or from finding its absence remarkable. By eroding the already-porous boundaries of documentary technique, Haunting undercuts the last stylistic clues most viewers can rely on to estimate the possible veracity of any given shot or sequence.

Notes

** Not an exact quote, I'm working from memory but trying to convey the sense of several bald statements that claim clear scientific support for extremely dubious statements about paranormal or fringe phenomena.

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