Town Creek (2009) - 2.5/4

When is a war truly over? It's officially over when either one side has been defeated or a peace is called. But the effects linger; it's not over for the people. Lives have been lost, families torn apart, animosity remains amongst the people. We're still not out of the gravity of World War II. We can look back on the American War of Independence without any real bitterness, without feeling the pain. However, there are still survivors of World War II and the horror of Hitler has never fully died. Black tendrils stretch out from his hateful existence of decades ago all the way to today. In Town Creek, those tendrils take a very concrete form, and that form is an immortal Nazi necromancer named 'Wirth'.

Joel Schumacher directs a tense and efficient picture with Town Creek. After a brief ten-minute prologue that puts all the pieces in place, he pulls is right into the action and it's a non-stop battle for the remaining eighty minutes. We learn a Nazi agent is boarding with a German immigrant family while studying the occult power of a runestone discovered around Town Creek back in the 1920s. And we learn that a young paramedic lost his war-hero brother (a veteran of Iraq) in mysterious circumstances around Town Creek in the 2000s. When that brother suddenly appears again, they arm up and head out to the farmhouse where they do battle with the sinister necromancer by night.

A necromancer is a monster rarely encountered in horror cinema. I'm not sure why, because there are a lot of fascinating avenues with such a monster. For one, each time some living being is killed, the necromancer can raise it from the dead as his puppet. In Town Creek, this leads to a particularly remarkable sequence with a horse. It's one of the most sublime moments of modern horror cinema. We can thank Schumacher for trying out some very interesting ideas using his monster, for exploring the possibilities. Soon, however, it comes time for the protagonists to protag and that's when the possibilities tend to be curtailed for the sake of the plot. This is unfortunate, as I felt Schumacher had more tricks up his sleeves; but the brisk ninety-minute runtime makes this necessarily the case, alas.

The shooting style of the first twenty-minutes or so, with the two brothers invading the farmhouse, will remind anyone who has seen Martyrs of that movie. Where Martyrs then descends into idle philosophical wankery and unpleasant torture, Town Creek at that point becomes a tense, atmospheric battle with supernatural remnants of the Third Reich that threaten to destroy the world.

Schumacher is one of those middle-brow directors who can't quite be called an intellectual, but can't be dismissed as a mere genre director either. He does makes some obvious mainstream moves, like having a girl stare dramatically out of a dingy farmhouse window into the night and say, "It begins." Gee, could that be for the trailer? However, he does have ideas to work with, visually and thematically. There are the past-present relationships I referred to in my first paragraph. But also, this is a film with Nazis, so as you might imagine, guilt and responsibility are major themes. The family keeping the necromancer at bay are also guilty of several torture-murders. How innocent are they? Is Schumacher making a statement in defence of the Bush administration's torture-interrogations? Or is he making a more subtle statement about the moral complexities of such issues? It's something to think about, if merely enjoying a good necromancer-based horror movie isn't enough for you. If however that is enough for you, then you'll find plenty to enjoy. Town Creek is an effective horror picture with some great, original ideas on screen in its third act.