The Haunting of Molly Hartley

The Haunting of Molly Hartley is a 2008 American supernatural horror film written by John Travis and Rebecca Sonnenshine and directed by Mickey Liddell. The film, starring Haley Bennett, Chace Crawford, AnnaLynne McCord, and Jake Weber, was a critical failure but a mild commercial success. Plot The film begins with a teenage girl, Laurel Miller (Jessica Lowndes), going into the woods to meet her boyfriend Michael (Randy Wayne). He gives her an early birthday present, but her father (Jamie McShane) shows up and demands that she leave with him. As they drive home, Laurel tells him that she will be marrying Michael as soon as she turns eighteen. He breaks down and apologizes to her, telling her he can't let her turn 18, then purposely crashes their car. Seeing that she is not dead, he kills her with a broken piece of mirror, saying he couldn't let the darkness take her. In present day, 17-year-old Molly Hartley (Haley Bennett) is stabbed in the chest by her deranged mother Jane (Marin Hinkle) with a pair of scissors. Although she survives, she is haunted in her dreams by the experience. She lives with her father Robert (Jake Weber), and her mother is locked up in a mental ward. Her father enrolls Molly in a new school to help with the trauma and start a new life. However, as her eighteenth birthday approaches, Molly has continuing nightmares of her mother's attack. Joseph Young (Chace Crawford), one of her classmates, attempts to help her; however, she begins to display symptoms of the same psychosis that took control of her mother's life. Molly attends a party at Joseph's house, where his jealous ex-girlfriend tries to attack her. She breaks the girl's arm and leaves the party. She has another hallucination of her mother attacking her and has a panic attack. The next morning she apologizes to Joseph's ex, who says she knows what Molly is. At home, Molly is cornered by her mother and discovers that she and others want to kill her in order to save her from a preordained life as a servant to Satan. It is revealed that Molly had died as the result of a miscarriage and her parents made a pact with the Devil to save her life. The terms of the agreement were such that the Hartleys would only have Molly until her eighteenth birthday, then she would belong to the Devil. After Jane is accidentally killed, and upon knocking her father out, Molly runs to seek salvation by accepting a baptism by Alexis, who tries to drown her.