Chiller TV Offers More Fright…or Flight

Chiller TV Offers More Fright…or Flight by Roxanne McDonald

While Chiller TV can’t take credit or blame for the making of The St. Francisville Experiment, the network at least delivers something worth talking about.

Better than the fortieth repeat of …the Damned movies, The St. Francisville Experiment gives viewers plenty to talk (or argue) about.

I stayed up until nine in the morning to see this film through, just so I could 1) figure out whether it was a Blair Witch Project knockoff and 2) to get closure enough that I could sleep.

The movie is delightfully deceiving: sets up as a documentary following the explorations of four people who are planning to spend the night in a reputedly haunted Louisiana mansion, prefaces the overnighter with interviews with a paranormal expert (Karen Smith), a voodoo priestess (Ava Kay Jones), and a psychic (Sarah Clifford). Then the four participants in the “experiment” are given a quick lesson in the tools of the trade—heat gauges and movement sensors and the like.
The problems begin for me, however, when Troy Taylor says he is not going to divulge any historical information to the four ghost hunters, and then continue as continuity, editing, and blooper gaffs.

First, Taylor gets the background of the mansion, but does not pass it on to the four ghost hunters. But toward the end of the movie, Madison refers to Madame LaLaurie. How did she know this name?

Next, the conceit includes how the four in the house are the ones doing the filming of their night in the haunted mansion. So we see through the frame of one of the four. Yet, in several places, there is a fifth frame. For example, when Tim Baldini goes where we are yelling for him NOT to go alone, he is dragged from his crying at the catacomb door down the hall or shaft [to the basement]. The camera angle, however, is not his; it is from a steady fifth person p o v cam we see him being dragged away.

And third, as others have pointed out (and as I was first thinking this was not an actual documentary–which it was evidently intended, originally), the scene where Ryan is eating a sandwich is set up poorly: she holds this big yummy

sandwich so that it is squarely in the center of the frame, and so we can see the giant cockroach on the end facing us and away from her. But whose camera is it, if it stays on her for the most part, and if it obviously (too obviously) focuses on the cockroach? If it is her cam (which happens often in the movie, when a participant will videotape him- or herself by setting the camera just plop down in front), then it would follow the progress of the roach to the mouth. If it is the camera of a fellow ghost hunter, and if they are all as protective of one another as they purport to be in the rest of the movie, then the one holding a camera on this scene would have stopped her from eating the roach.
Some say this movie stopped them from eating their popcorn.
Others say they regret spending the money on a disappointing movie they could have spent their money better on the popcorn by itself.
I have yet to get over the fine suspenseful moments (good regardless of genre), the first half hour of set-up (which was well done enough to engage in the first place), and the schmaltzy few effects/elements (Ryan screamed and cried way too loudly and way too much, the cat was unnecessary, etc.) that wrecked what could have otherwise been a seamless and seriously scary mocumentary.

But again, a thousand thanks to Chiller TV for programming the movie, along with Hitchcock, Friday the 13th, and Night Gallery, as well as one or two other great films…to save the station from repeat of bad b films hell.

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