I watch a lot of horror movies, so it isn't exactly easy to creep me out. And I don't know if I'd characterize The Mothman Prophecies as scary, necessarily-but it did get to me. And that's high praise for a movie as formulaic and, I think, as ultimately unconvincing as this one is.

Lay the credit at the feet of director Mark Pellington. He made a film a couple years back called Arlington Road, which hinged on the stupid question of whether Jeff Bridges' creepy neighbor Tim Robbins was actually a terrorist. (Of course he was a terrorist. The casting would have made that abundantly clear, even if the too-much-information trailers didn't.) The film got more mileage out of the set-up than it should have, thanks in large part to Pellington's nail-biting photographic style, which helped sell the highly improbable climax. You may know him better for his renowned video for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," which was itself a pretty disturbing reel of film.

Pellington cranks the style knob up to 11 for Mothman, saturating the picture in gimmicky special-effects transitions, grainy photography, and quick, what-the-hell-did-I-just-see? editorial fluorishes. One shot in particular was soaked with so much tension that the payoff, a pretty minor one, had the audience at my screening a-jumpin' and a-screamin' like they had never seen a scary movie before.

So my thumbs are up, on the whole, for Pellington's direction, which encompasses the aforementioned scary shit as well as a dazzling climactic sequence that is the film's real raison d'etre. The trouble is that this Pellington guy seems to be drawn to overly flashy scripts that invite befuddlement along with the estimable chills. The Mothman Prophecies, for instance, has a compelling idea at its center (and you may want to check out here if you're sensitive to spoilers). The concept, as near as I can figure is that human beings sometimes feel a psychic premonition before terrible things happen. This phenomenon winds up tapping into primal images hidden in our collective unconscious (or planted there by some kind of hidden intelligence that we don't begin to understand); in this case, they manifest themselves as eerie images of a winged man who resembles nothing so much as a large, scary insect.

Well, that's the story that I like, anyway. The story that the film presents is a little more sensational, and therefore less interesting and coherent. The movie suggests, strongly, that the Mothman has a physical presence, leaving a Y-shaped mark at the sites of human contact. The movie even trots out the idea that Mothman has a prepaid phone card that lets him telephone nervous journalists in the middle of the night, frightening them by announcing the kind of tiny details that could only be known by someone standing in the same room. On expert analysis, the Mothman's lines are determined not to have been delivered by human vocal cords (a quaint notion given that voice synthesis is easily available technology these days for any 12 year old with a PC).

A title card purports that the film is "Based on True Events," a convolution of the language that suggests it was impossible to claim that it was "Based on a True Story" with a straight face. Indeed, significant liberties have been taken, including the re-casting of the film's protagonist-in reality John Keel, a UFO researcher from New York-as John Klein, a highly credible reporter from The Washington Post whose wife died of a rare variety of brain tumor. Once you realize that the circumstances of Klein's life are fabricated from whole cloth for the film, it's difficult to figure out how the events as depicted square with what "really" happened, or to make much sense out of Keel's own theories about the Mothman, which are more interesting than most of what happens on screen.

The film has no sense of humor about all this crazy shit. For the most part, Richard Gere plays Klein like he wants the Fox network to cast him opposite Gillian Anderson, but a cursory look at Keel's career reveals the man to have a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, even if he is a bit of a nut. It helps to have Laura Linney in place as a cop Klein befriends on his extended visit to the small town of Pleasant Point, West Virginia, since she functions as a skeptical counterweight to all the seriousness on display. Even better, she takes events at face value so that the film never devolves into one of those shouting matches about unbelievable events that usually ends up with someone yelling "I don't know what to believe!" At one point, informed of some paranormal event too creepy to be true, she simply declares, "I can't stand it" and turns and walks from the room. I admired that.

The film's raison d'etre isn't apparent until the very ending, when Pellington finally starts to shovel big sackfuls of money around and we learn what the residents of Point Pleasant have been on about. Once it's over, it all feels like a non-event. Maybe the best way to read The Mothman Prophecies is as an exercise in using an extended narrative about supernatural occurences as a vehicle for revealing the grieving process going on in one character's head. I had hoped that the success of The Sixth Sense meant that American audiences would be treated to serious horror movies for a change, and that seems to have happened to a modest degree. What I hadn't counted on was the extent to which these movies-I'm thinking Mothman as well as last year's sleeper hits The Others and Vanilla Sky-would share with The Sixth Sense a desire to closely examine death and the aftermath of death as paranormal phenomena. Indeed, John Keel himself might wonder if the arrival of all these death-obsessed Hollywood films roughly coincident with the September 11 attacks had a paranormal meaning of its own.