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.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Ogre (2008)

Some time in the first half of the 19th Century (or the late 18th, as the film's not forthcoming or, one suspects, doesn't actually know the difference), a small town in some American woods that look disturbingly like British Columbia is beset by a terrible plague. The townsfolk are so desperate, they agree to a dark plan of their local magus (I'll have you know in the olden times every village had its own magus but curiously, no priest) Bartlett Henry (John Schneider) to keep away the plague. After having been made magistrate, Bartlett casts out all of the town's illness, which then concentrates itself into a horrible monster, an ogre.

The ogre is a ravaging beast by nature and has to be kept away from the town by the yearly sacrifice of one of the townsfolk's own. On the plus side, those people who aren't sacrificed will never get ill, don't age, and don't have to think about contraception anymore either - it's all part of the spell. The townsfolk also aren't able to cross the town limits and live anymore, but everything has his drawbacks.

In the now of 2008, a quartet of hikers (among them Ryan Kennedy and Katharine Isabelle in a performance so dreadful and annoying I really didn't think she had in her) in search of the rumoured and lost town stumble upon the charming little place that hasn't changed at all in the last centuries (except for the sacrifice-shrunk population, of course). Their arrival signals the beginning of a change. Those among the townsfolk who disapprove of the whole immortality and sacrifice culture - among them Henry's own daughter Hope (Chelan Simmons) - finally decide to stop whining and do something about their situation. Clearly, that's not a thing ogre and magi approve of.

As is obvious, Steven R. Monroe's Ogre belongs to the group of SyFy Channel productions that attempt to change up the whole monster mash formula by adding monsters to some ideas borrowed from other movies (in this case, The Village without the crap twist-ending nonsense of our buddy M. Night), closing their eyes and hoping for the best.

That technique works well enough in this particular case. While the matter-of-fact presence of a magus in a rather normal village and some of the plot's other basics are of course quite silly, the movie really isn't a bad example of that well-worn narrative in which an isolated group of people first makes one horrible decision and afterwards can't face up to what they've down well enough to change their situation until some strangers demonstrate courage in the face of adversity to them. It's nothing new, but the minimalist set-up works quite well for that very traditional story as seen in many a Western (just without the ogre). I think the film goes for the archetypal here, even though I know well enough that the plot's simplicity is a result of Ogre's low budget.

Monroe's direction is often atmospheric, particularly if you've grown up with American TV shows filmed in British Columbia, and can't get enough of that wet autumn look. There are, alas, some very obvious continuity gaffes and - particularly during the first act - some rough editing that don't fit into the picture of Monroe's general technical competence and Tom Harting's fine cinematography at all. Ogre's other problems are often weak dialogue - particularly in the villagers' unconvincing olden time speak the modern characters ill-advisedly even make fun of, and in every fucking word Isabelle says - and one of SyFy's shittier CGI monsters. On paper, it's a funny enough idea to use an ogre designed to look like an evil, brown Shrek, but in practice, the thing looks particularly unthreatening even as part of a series of TV movies that often seems to go out of their way to not let their monsters look threatening at all.

Yet still, despite the clear and obvious problems, Ogre is a worthwhile little movie, making up for everything that's wrong with it with Monroe's ability to tell a simple, decidedly not stupid, story in the simple, decidedly not stupid way that befits it.

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