Thirteen simultaneous murders wipe out the secret cabal which has always given psychic protection to the US President. The race is on to track down the traitor responsible and also to provide psychic protection to the President and his family from the increasingly disturbing hauntings.

SYNOPSIS:

The movie opens with rapid-fire cuts of seemingly-unrelated murders spread across the US.

Night One. The White House. The President and his wife are woken by knocking on the wall of their bedroom. The Secret Service burst in. It emerges that the knocking is coming from inside the wall.

Next morning. FBI Headquarters. The FBI computer has flagged a number of deaths that seemingly have nothing in common -except in each case, a ring was taken. Agents soon realize that all these murders took place simultaneously. They must have been professional hits… and somehow linked.

Night Two. Escalation in the haunting of the President. Their pet dog wakes them by barking at a seemingly blank wall. Their 7-year-old daughter screams, swearing that a man is at the end of her bed staring at her.

Next day. Suspicion for the murders has formed around Tyler Caris, an Australian living in LA, running something that the FBI consider a cult. He knew the murder victims - one of them very well because this man left $2.5 million to Tyler’s spiritual centre. Tyler is arrested and taken to be questioned in Washington.

Night Three. Creepier. The President’s wife wakes up inside her body but she can’t move her body. The President’s dream takes him to a temple where he swears allegiance to a figure in a temple. Scream as the wife’s President takes control back of her body.

Next day. The Secret Service takes over the FBI investigation. The Head of the Secret Service reveals that the murdered people were a cabal that provided psychic protection to the President - it had always been this way. He has Tyler released from the cell and enlists him to help provide spiritual protection to the US President.

Tyler is taken to the White House. There is a clash between him and the President. All this psychic nonsense clashes with the President’s Christian belief. Tyler is ejected.

Night Four. An astral entity penetrates the President’s bedroom and astral fingers lunge at the throat of the President’s wife. She awakes screaming - and screaming at the President to get Tyler back in.

There is a two-fold race:

1. To find the high-level traitor who knew about the cabal protecting the President and had them murdered.
2. To defuse the psychic attacks.

The traitor is detected. But there is an intimation that the ultimate source of the psychic attacks has not been found and defused - and won’t be until the sequel which will complete the story.

Reflections on The Haunting of the American President

This film combines the genres of ghost story and political thriller.

It also explores societal and metaphysical themes.

The American President stands a symbol of America as a whole. As such, the haunting of the American President is a metaphor for what haunts the great American dream.

This is one of the reasons that a key player is non-American (the Australian, Tyler) - as he stands outside that which haunts America.

The film starts off with something that deeply haunts the American dream: violence against innocent people going about their everyday lives.

There is also a sub-theme about the US being haunted by its military past (cf, Vietnam).

The film is also about a clash of visions of the meaning of life. The American President represents the old-fashioned American vision: unquestioning belief in the Bible. He becomes angry and confused about the incursion of other spiritual possibilities (represented by the hauntings) - cf, America’s struggle to come to terms with a multi-religious society containing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, agnosticism, atheism, etc.

The FBI and Secret Service represents something more current: the religion of being efficient where beliefs about the afterlife simply distract from worldly effectiveness.

The film is self-contained but the story has been conceived as a two-film journey.