Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

[Barry Karr <SkeptInq@AOL.COM>]

Haunting Mockumentary Reaches New Lows
Review for the Council for Media Integrity (CMI)

Tom Flynn

A Haunting in Georgia, 2-hour "special documentary." Produced by New Dominion
Pictures, executive producer Tom Naughton. Viewed on Discovery Channel,
Sunday September 23, 9:00 - 11:00 p.m. Eastern. Will be rebroadcast
frequently.

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 Ellersie, 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.

Tom Flynn is editor of Free Inquiry and director of Inquiry Media
Productions. He authored the article on "Photography as It Applies to the
Paranormal" in Gordon Stein's Encyclopedia of the Paranormal.


Notes

* For terminological clarity, docudrama means a program shot in an entirely
fictionalized cinematic style, but which purports to tell the story of real
events. Mockumentary means a program shot in a faux documentary style which
uses latter-day re-enactments to supply narrative material for which actual
historic footage is unavailable or would be impossible to obtain.

** 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.


The Council for Media Integrity is an educational outreach and advocacy
program of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP).  It was founded in the summer of 1996 at the first World
Skeptics Congress, held at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The
Council is comprised of a network of distinguished international scientists,
academics, and members of the media concerned with the balanced portrayal of
science in the media. Members of the Council include E.O. Wilson, Martin
Gardner, and Sir John Maddox.