Blood Creek (2009)

Director: Joel Schumacher                              Writer: David Kajganich
Film Score: David Buckley                              Cinematography: Darko Suvak
Starring: Henry Cavill, Dominic Purcell, Emma Booth and Michael Fassbender

I almost never watch modern horror movies for one reason: they’re bad. It’s the same kind of plots, the same kind of violence, the same kinds of stylized film manipulation that wind up making them a uniform mass of blandness. Blood Creek is no different. How can it be that people being tortured, mutilated, and killed could possibly be boring? It is the culture of violence, the parade of death on television, post 9-11 loss of innocence? No, it’s simply lack of imagination. Ever since the advent of the slasher film in 1978, there has been an increasingly unimaginative trend in a genre of film that no longer can count on death itself as something horrifying. What we see now in modern horror are simply old ideas reshuffled and packaged as something new but nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before.

Blood Creek is yet another version of Night of the Living Dead. People trapped in a house with a madman outside trying to kill them. This madman can kill animals and people and then transform them into zombies in order to enter the house that he cannot because of the runic symbols on the doors and windows. There are also elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as a villain who is a combination of The Dark Man--this time the trench-coated shadow is the killer rather than the hero--and Michael Berryman from The Hills Have Eyes. In the film the impetus for evil is a Nazi scholar who studied ancient rune stones in America in order to satisfy their desire to acquire occult power. That’s the reason the film interested me, that and Joel Schumacher, a mainstream director who had done films like Flatliners and 8MM. But in the end the Nazi angle doesn’t really matter at all. It’s just Jason/Freddie/Michael holding hostage a group that needs to find a way to kill him.

Going in, the film looks like it at least has a chance. In addition to Schumacher there is some good talent onboard. Michael Fassbender, who was great in Prometheus and 300 is the Nazi villain. Dominic Purcell, who has done a lot of beefcake roles in action pictures, is the one who got away and now, with his brother Henry Cavill, is back to put an end to the violence. Cavill has had a short career and has a fairly eclectic body of work including historical drama as well as action films, but doesn’t bring anything to this picture that a dozen other actors couldn’t. And that’s another aspect of the boredom of these types of pictures: the cast is relatively unimportant, too. They are generic characters who would be replaced by any other competent actor and therefore we have nothing invested in them. I thought Blood Creek might actually have something new to bring to the modern horror film, via its focus on Nazi history, but I was wrong. It’s just another zombie slasher film.