In short: The Ghostmaker (2012)

aka Box of Shadows

Warning: some spoilers ahead!

On his house clearing job, Kyle (Aaron Dean Eisenberg) stumbles upon a curious device. At first glance, the thing looks like a coffin with a whole load of clockwork added to it, as well as coming with a nice, creepy Christopher Young melody. In actuality, it’s a device developed by a 15th Century occultist/inventor that separates a person’s spirit from its body for a while. The spirit is able to roam free, walk through walls and invisibly spy on whatever it wants. Using the device may also awaken the interest of forces one might not want to be noticed by.

Of course, even without that particular problem, Kyle and the friends he’s using the coffin with are not ideal material for even this tiny amount of power. Kyle’s quite far on his way to becoming a proper meth head, which puts a lot of strain on his relationship to his girlfriend Julie (Liz Fenning), and even minor superpowers are not a great idea in a case like his. Kyle’s wheelchair bound friend and roommate Sutton (J. Walter Holland) is an even worse candidate, seeing as he uses the opportunity to now finally be able to better stalk Julie. Obviously, things will escalate.

Mauro Borrelli’s The Ghostmaker is an interesting variation on elements of Flatliners, with a much more interesting background to the occult experiments and a quite a bit more screwed up cast of characters. It does suffer visibly under its tight budget, though, with effects that work better as ideas than as what you actually see on screen, and the usual pitfall of many lower budget films made in the last decades of scenes generally going on much longer than they need to or should.

For a character-based piece of horror, the writing’s a bit too broad as well: I absolutely appreciate where the film wants to go, but it is not really making the right moves for me to be able to follow.

In short: Haunted Forest (2007)

Native American Sean (Sevy Di Cione) and a couple of his friends come to a supposedly haunted forest looking for a cursed tree. Sean is following a trail laid down by his grandfather in a pretty eldritch looking book, trying to right the wrong which caused the supernatural problems the area is now suffering from. Things don’t go terribly well for the group, nor for the parallel wood traipsers of Jennifer (Jennifer Luree) and Kiyomi (Naomi Ueno), because the Evil around here is physically as well as spiritually infectious.

I had rather a lot of fun with director/writer Mauro Borrelli’s WarHunt, so taking a look at this earlier example of his work that just happens to also be about people encountering the supernatural in a creepy patch of forest seemed like a good idea. This is a bit less slick than the later movie, clearly made on an even tighter budget, but it also shows some of the same elements I enjoyed so much there. Mainly, Borreli has a great eye for the creepy picture and so manages quite a few highly effective and genuinely interesting and inventive shots and scenes of plant-based body horror and rather original witchcraft. Practically every horror scene here has one really clever or creepy bit that elevates everything around it, turning what could be a very by the numbers kill show into a movie that’s rather more macabre than these things typically get.

To be fair, there’s also a lot of not terribly involving character interaction on screen, with middling acting and middling dialogue, but I found myself okay with these moments of slight tedium, because there was always the next cool little scene of plant witchery to look forward to.

WarHunt (2022)

The tail end of World War II. A US plane crashes in the German Schwarzwald thanks to what looks a lot like supernatural intervention to me.

Sergeant Brewster (Robert Knepper) and his squad of tired veterans are tasked to wander into the forest, find the plane wreck and rescue possible survivors. For mysterious reasons, one Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), probably of the BPRD, orders Brewster to take one of his own men, Walsh (Jackson Rathbone) with him as some kind of vaguely defined specialist for something or other.

Brewster is not amused, but it’s the military, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Walsh will turn out to be a definite asset, what with him being the only one who actually knows what’s going on in the forest. Which is rather useful once the squad is slowly whittled down in numbers, driven crazy or changed by a coven of witches with a bit of a raven fetish.

As regular readers (hi, Mom!) will know, I have a bit of a weakness for pulpy movies about soldiers versus the supernatural, so Mauro Borrelli’s shot in Latvia WarHunt does push some of my favourite buttons.

As it turns out not just because it knows its genre and the tropes and beats it really needs to hit to function in it pretty well, but because it is simply a genuinely entertaining bit of low budget horror that tends to use its minor budget with quite a bit of creativity, perhaps even enthusiasm. At the very least, Borelli (who also co-wrote with Reggie Keyohara III and Scott Svatos) has some good ideas for using bits and pieces of witch folklore in a creative manner, so that the mix of a bit of body horror, some psychological stuff and the action elements that belong to this particular sub-genre go down pretty satisfyingly and feels consistent.

Borrelli’s always at least a competent director here, regularly hitting on a clever piece of framing or presentation, properly spooky lighting or a neat bit of production design to make some scenes rather more than they would be in less invested hands. I’m particularly fond of a genuinely creepy sequence concerning some roasted pig; the set for the climactic fight below a windmill (which is a pretty perfect place for a witches’ lair going by folklore about millers in Europe) is surprisingly wonderful, too.

The films also adds some Hellboy-esque lore to up the stakes the protagonists are fighting for that make decent sense for its kind of pulp universe, and keeps the film away from the problem of having some random soldiers just randomly stumbling on the witches.

Really, the only thing to criticize realistically – this is a low budget pulp horror/action film, so it not being an A24 joint is not actually a point against the film – about WarHunt is the artistically pointless inclusion of Mickey Rourke, whose scenes mostly seem to be in the film to make the most of the couple of shooting days he was available for them, and have little use beyond slowing things down. Though, to be fair, Borrelli does keep the “star”-induced drag I’ve come to detect and loathe through oh so many direct to whatever action movies to a minimum by keeping the Rourke show scenes relatively short and adding them in places where they do not get too annoying. And Knepper, Rathbone and the rest of the film’s actual cast are not only actually in the movie we are watching, but do give perfectly good performances for the kind of film this is.