Conjurer (2008)

After a stillbirth in the late stages of pregnancy, teacher Helen (Maxine Bahns) and her art photographer husband Shawn (Andrew Bowen) leave the Big City behind and move to the country. Helen’s self-declared rich-ass developer brother Frank (John Schneider) is going to build them a house somewhere in the deep south, and apparently make a handsome amount of bucks from the other houses he’s going to build on the property. For now, they move into an older house on the same property.

At first, the good country air is working wonders for Helen’s mental well-being, and even city boy Shawn seems to do very well indeed. Unfortunately, things soon take a turn for the unpleasant, when Shawn explores an empty old shack standing a hundred meters or so away from their house. He finds strange amulets with human teeth there, and cuts himself – a wound which will never heal and only get worse throughout the rest of the movie. Shawn starts hearing and seeing peculiar and disturbing things: mysterious lights at night in the shack, a crow that acts rather more sinister than these birds usually do, the shape of a woman staring at him.

Turns out there are tales about the shack reaching back to the end of the US Civil War basically everybody in the area knows. Apparently, it was home to a witch who didn’t take too kindly to anyone encroaching on her habitation. Further investigation provoked by increasing supernatural encounters for Shawn – Helen seems very much untouched by anything but the increasingly disturbed state of her husband’s mind – suggests a rather darker truth.

For a time, Clint Hutchison’s Conjurer is a very nice surprise. It may be cheap and look a bit like a TV movie – not a badly made TV movie, mind you – but it is also a more than decent attempt to make something like a US Southern folk horror film, a well of potential horror movie tales that still waits for more genre filmmakers to lower their buckets into. After all, as Conjurer in its own, pleasantly unspectacular, way demonstrates, there’s a whole, rich world of folk tales of conjure women, crow familiars and creepy little cabins to build your own movie mythology on; and if you want to say something about the world with your horror films, there’s this slavery thing you might have heard about, as well as the Jim Crow laws afterwards that would make a rather obvious entry point there which could also rather well be used in connection with Southern folk horror.

But even for a film like Conjurer that isn’t interested in the shadow of slavery, the use of a pseudo-folkloric background does wonders for its atmosphere, combining with the Georgia locations to create an actual sense of place – and that without the film ever trying to cart out the expected character clichés. Why, even the character mostly in tune with your typical movie yokel correctly believing in the supernatural isn’t drawn as crudely as all that, and so works very well as just a guy who believes in things he has learned to be true from his own experience, whereas the rest of the couple of locals we meet is just as unbelieving as anybody you’d meet anywhere else. Extra bonus points for the film not going overboard with the accents; there’s little that makes a film feel less taking place somewhere than attempts at really hammering it home.

This isn’t a film of big shocks or gore, but presents itself as a pretty traditional ghost story. Hutchison’s not really reaching great depths of horror there, either, yet the film has a general air of calm competence that simply works for what it does. Just because a film doesn’t really stare into the abyss doesn’t mean it is not delivering some pleasant chills, after all.

I am less satisfied with the climax of the plot, though, which goes for exactly the sort of double twist you’d expect and that really leaves the plot hanging in a rather dissatisfying way. I am usually a big fan of ambiguous and open endings in horror, but if a film is as straightforward as Conjurer is, it does demand an equally straightforward ending.


Nonetheless, given the relatively minor number of Southern folk horror movies, and the fact that the film works well for as long as its does, Conjurer is certainly worthy of more eyes – and kind words – than it seems to have gotten.

Accidental TV Movie Week: Terror Tract (2000)

Accidental TV Movie Week is what happens when I read the excellent “Are You in the House Alone?” edited by blogger and podcaster Amanda Reyes and spend a week only watching the sort of US TV movie treated in the book. Don’t be afraid.

A real estate agent of somewhat intense disposition (John Ritter) shows off three houses to a young couple (David DeLuise and Allison Smith). The prospective homeowners become increasingly disturbed, for the real estate agent follows the spirit of full disclosure (it’s the law, apparently) to the limit and tells them a tale of the horrible/hilarious things that went down in each of these places, leading to three segments, after whose telling things become rather peculiar.

In the first, “Nightmare”, a wife (Rachel York) and her lover (Carmine Giovinazzo) are caught in the act by her crazy husband (Fredric Lehne). Hubby hasn’t quite gotten the memo about grown-up reactions to this sort of thing and plans to shoot him and hang her, making it look like a murder suicide. The couple manage to turn the tables on him, leading to a very dead husband but because “the cops wouldn’t believe us” – a refrain in all three tales – they decide to hide the body and pretend he just disappeared. Alas, various natural – neither her nerves nor his brain can cope with the situation, plus the hubby’s fishing buddy was a cop – and unnatural – assholes seldom rest easily in horror movies after all – occurrences are standing in the way of anything but a darkly ironic ending.

The second segment, “Bobo”, sees the loving relationship between a man (Bryan Cranston) and his little daughter (Katelin Petersen) threatened when she finds a monkey dressed in a red suit out in the family home’s garden. Dubbing him Bobo, it’s love at first sight for the kid, but her Dad seems rather taken aback by the animal. Now, perhaps his wife (Jodi Harris) is right and he’s just feeling threatened by realizing he has no actual control about his daughter’s feelings towards anyone or anything – not even himself; on the other hand, the monkey might indeed be a crazed killer and brother in spirit to that charming animal in Argento’s Phenomena. In any case, the duel between Cranston and Monkey becomes increasingly deranged.

In the final tale, “Come to Granny”, a psychiatrist (Brenda Strong) suffers through a surprise visit by a young man (Will Estes) who tells her a wild tale about his mental connection to the local serial killer, dubbed the Granny Killer because he’s wearing a creepy old woman mask and offing his victims while making granny-based quips. Apparently, the guy has visions of all of the killer’s murders – or is he perhaps the killer?

Terror Tract – directed by Lance W. Dreesen and Clint Hutchison - is a low budget thriller anthology made for the USA Channel and/or the direct-to-DVD market of the time. As it goes with the former in its late period movies, the degree of sex and violence on offer is not terribly high – it’s about on the level of an X-Files episode (and not “Home”, for that matter), with a moment of sideboob thrown in. That’s quite a bit more of direct depravity than you got during the high water mark of this sort of TV production during the 70s, but the gore hounds among my imaginary readers might want to keep this in mind when they storm their imaginary video stores to acquire this.

As a whole, this anthology movie is a rather fun black horror comedy treating the US suburbs as a breeding ground for madness and violence full of absolutely crazy, nice, white, upper middleclass people and murderous monkeys. Pencil that in as conscious – if terribly blunt – satire, or just as a film following one string of US horror traditions to near absurdity. In any case, the whole thing culminates in a very silly yet also very funny and actually pretty clever sequence that suggests the specific suburb these tales take place in is indeed the place where all horror and thriller stories located in the suburbs take place in, or perhaps the platonic ideal of this place.

The framing sequences are – atypical for a anthology horror – very much worthwhile, with something that feels a lot like the kind of story Stephen King would have put into one of his first couple of short story collections taking place in the background. Ritter is playing against his image quite wonderfully, giving a performance that’s just the right kind of broad, and DeLuise and Smith mostly function as his straight people, until that excellent final sequence.

Of the episodes, “Nightmare” is probably the most traditionally straightforward one, apart from the fact that our doomed protagonists aren’t actually guilty of much more than adultery and stupidity. Usually, it takes a little more than that to be punished this heavily in an EC-style horror tale. It is atmospheric in any case, with some fine scenes that blur the line between dream and reality and an ending that feels surprisingly nasty.

“Bobo” is obviously the highpoint of the film. This is after all a tale in which a young-ish Bryan Cranston rants and raves through a psychological and physical duel with a wee little knife-wielding monkey. “Bobo” delivers everything that high concept promises through a brilliant tour-de-force performance by an increasingly deranged Cranston and some good work by the monkey(s) too. The editing’s also fantastic, as is the fact that this slightly insane little ditty also has more thematic resonance than I’d have expected. Of course, when you really think about it, what better way is there to talk about a white middle-class guy’s anxieties about the brittleness of his life, his love, and his possessions is there than to let him fight a monkey?

For some reason, the last proper segment of the film is its weakest. The Granny Killer mask is appropriately creepy, and the murder visions are filmed in a bit of a giallo style, but the plot as a whole is terribly predictable, the twist even more so. There’s just not much of interest going on there.


However, every anthology horror film is bound by law to have at least one weak segment, so Terror Tract is really only doing its duty here. It doesn’t matter much anyhow, for the rest of the film is not just pretty damn fun, it is also quite a bit more clever than I would have expected going in. And frankly, there is no way I wouldn’t recommend a film with “Bobo” in it, even if the rest of it were completely unwatchable.