Conjurer
Starring: Andrew Bowen, Maxine Bahns, John Schneider, Liz McGeever
Directed By: Clint Hutchison
Written By: Clint Hutchison, David Yarbrough
Released: 2008
Grade: B-

Conjurer is a haunted house/ghost story that although it is a pretty decent movie, doesn’t do anything to set itself apart from other films of similar subject matter. The film is in no respects bad, but it just could have been better. This was frustrating to some extent, but with it’s slow start, it sets a casual tone. It manages to shape up with a lot of changes in the story, all unfolding at once.

Shawn (Bowen) and Helen (Bahns) are a young, happy, married couple who is about to have their first child and start their life together. However, they lose the baby at birth, which comes as a terror and shock to both of them. A year later, Helen is still trying to get over it. To help her do this, Shawn agrees to move with her to a rural town, near where she grew up. Helen’s brother, Frank (Schneider) buys them a house there and helps them get settled in. At first this seclusion seems nice, especially with the news that Helen is pregnant again. This brings hope to their family, but it isn’t enough to save them. Shawn notices a lot of strange things going on around the house, even literally causing him physical pain. He sees one of the neighborhood kids around and assumes that it must be him, taunting them. However, when he goes after this suspicion, he is given something more to fear.

Shawn learns the legend of the cabin on their property and why it is haunted. It is revealed that the land that they were on belonged to a man some time ago. After he left and got back after the civil war, a woman had built a cabin there and was living in it. He immediately kicked her out and burned the cabin down to the ground. Soon the man’s wife and child had become deathly ill. The woman promised that the only way that they would live was if he re-built the cabin. After he did, both of them made a miraculous and sudden recovery. Scared by the powers this woman seemed to possess, he got his family and vacated the premises. She didn’t have any luck with the next man that owned the property. He got her pregnant, but demanded that she keep the baby. This baby was essential to the woman and was devastated when she lost the it. As if killing her baby wasn’t bad enough, he hanged her for being a witch. This may have ended her life, but it didn’t end her existence. She claimed that she would never really leave the land until she was given her baby back. From that point on she constantly tormented anyone who wronged her. At first Shawn doesn’t take this too seriously, but it seems to make more and more sense. The ghosts and cursing upon him become more and more real. He fears that it is no longer safe there for him and his wife, especially since he fears that his child is the one that will be taken to rectify the wrongs of the past.

Conjurer heavily relies on the ending to the film. Now, it really isn’t a twist ending or anything, but there a lot of things that are twisted on us all at once. It seems to rely on this a little too much though. The other parts of the film could be a lot worse than they are. Luckily, they manage to show a sense of who each character is. We are at least given little clues and hints along the way, to give us the some train of thought that Shawn has. The back story of the curse of the town is really needed. It is good, but not great, but at least it has some believability as far as reasoning for someone to haunt a land. The woman doesn’t just take revenge on any person. Even people who completely believe in her and the curse, say that nothing has happened to them since they didn’t mess with her. The motive for the woman in this case is clearly the baby. Helen was suddenly pregnant after moving there. It is very possible that the woman meant for the baby to be hers all along, just making Helen the middle man. In this sense, she is just taking what she believes is rightfully hers. Essentially though, they didn’t do anything wrong, so they shouldn’t be cursed.

What does happen in the ending turns around the plot holes of the woman’s ghosts and haunting. There is another haunting figure, Shawn as a kid. The ending that is very reflective and based on himself would seem a lot more justified if a bit more of his history was dealt with through out the film. Especially with the constant image of his self as a kid, lurking around, we aren’t given any reason why, or even any clue what he dealt with as a kid. This really isn’t handled at all, but at the end we finally receive some family context, but it is very brief and rushed, almost making it seem like the whole reason for adding the turns in the story is an easy way out of explaining everything else. It is the last few seconds that did this the most, nearly ruining the build up that we were just given. It was just done in a cheesy manner that should have been taken much seriously. Despite all of this, I really don’t think it is a bad movie. The acting was pretty decent and the production value was higher than you would expect. Their surroundings were experimented with a lot, as this rural town was almost like a character in itself. I also did like the paranoia side to it a lot. With a back story there is always the question, is this person just out of their mind? Could this really be possible? Conjurer deals with this a lot, with all of the heavy disbelief in Shawn’s theory.

Ghost and haunted house films seem to be struggling more than any other sub-genre in horror. It seems they usually have a few circumstantial events and we are given a few ghostlike allusions, with very little violence and we are not even shown many effects of what this amounted to . The only recent movie to really get it right is The Orphanage. This is because of the suspense it built up, but much more importantly, the past and history of the characters that it involved. If Shawn’s past would have been clearly dealt with more, the film would have benefited miraculously. Regardless of some of the flaws in the film, Conjurer is still an enjoyable haunted tale of revenge and the past coming back to affect in a very dangerous way.

- Kelsey Zukowski