Lucy Bell (Donna Pearson, left) and Betsy Bell (Home Banks) sit in horror after a attack from the Bell Witch in 'Bell Witch: The Movie,' showing at 7 p.m. Oct. 17 at Walters State's Morristown campus

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Walters State Community College's celebration of its first-ever student film contest is going to be spooky.

Larry Clifton, who teaches a film-appreciation course at the college, will announce the winner of the contest as the prelude to a free screening of "Bell Witch: The Movie," a family-friendly horror flick based on the popular legend of a long-ago suspected supernatural entity in Adams, Tenn. The award for the new contest has been dubbed "the Cliffy."

"I don't guess I could be embarrassed much more," says Clifton of the name, but he's willing to be teased for a good cause.

The presentation and screening will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17 in the theater of the Inman Humanities Complex at the Morristown campus. Clifton, an assistant professor of speech communications, served as a consultant and associate producer for "Bell Witch," which was shot in Townsend.

Walters State doesn't offer any classes in filmmaking, but the film-appreciation class, which Clifton initiated with the help of Jim Crawford, dean of the humanities division, and Malcolm McAvoy, head of the speech communications department, made it clear that students were interested in film.

"Because of the popularity of the film course, it was thought that we should have a film competition," says Clifton, who started out offering the class only once a year but now teaches it during fall semester at the Morristown campus and spring semester at the Sevierville campus.

"The criteria was you could make a five-minute DVD on any topic just so it wasn't vulgar, blasphemous or profane," he says. "As long as those three weren't incorporated, you could enter the contest. You don't have to be a member of the film-appreciation class."

After a screening of "Bell Witch" drew a standing-room-only crowd last fall, it was scheduled for a repeat this year - "brought back by popular demand," says Clifton, so the contest winner was tagged on to the event.

"Bell Witch" director and co-writer Shane Marr, who will do a Q&A after the screening, struggled for several years to get his feature produced and distributed.

"For an independent film, it's done pretty well," says Clifton, whose fourth book, "Cinema of Fright," is due out next year. While Marr has state-of-the-art professional equipment, aspiring filmmakers can produce good work with far simpler tools, and they can make films where they live.

"This shows you don't have to be in Hollywood to make films," Clifton says. "It can be done anywhere, which is pretty advantageous."

Clifton's film-appreciation course covers films by genre and decade, from the silent era on. Clifton himself was inspired by the late archivist and critic William K. Everson, who was his teacher when he was earning his master's in film studies at New York University.

"Primarily I deal with American film because so many of the students are ignorant of their own films," he says. "I show the students there's more going on than just what happened last year. The students are amazed that film has the wealth that it does."

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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