Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2022: SUMMONERS

Real magic isn’t bats’ wings and witches’ cauldrons. Real magic is places, things, people. Magic is memories and fears. It’s the tremble of a sudden gust of wind, or a thump in the night. It’s the love we have for each other and the secrets we hold onto. Summoners, a new film by Terence Krey that premiered in October at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, is all about real magic and how it can save you — and how, if you’re not careful, it can break you just as easily.

Two Witches Walk Into A Bar

Jessica  (Christine Nyland) is a witch. She’s dropped into her hometown in a last-minute visit to her father (Larry Fessenden). Visiting your hometown again after graduating college is already prime horror territory — beware which pizza restaurants have changed names and ownership, which roads are under construction, and oh my god, the Dunkin Donuts has a drive-through now?! But for Jess, it’s full of bad memories and sour relationships, since her mother died after cheating on her dad with a neighbor. She and Dad don’t talk about it.

After a very luxurious afternoon spent sitting on a library floor reading (goals), Jess bumps into Alana (McLean Peterson), an old friend of hers from school who never left town. Nyland and Peterson have such natural chemistry that you’re immediately drawn into their relationship, even if you’re not quite sure at first where Summoners is going.

The film is a slow burn, but that’s not a bad thing. Patient cinematography and editing lure us into the characters and their reunion, and the compositions and their cutting become more atmospheric and disembodied the deeper into the characters’ brackish pasts we go. (The DP here is Daniel Fox, a horror short director in his own right, and the editor is Krey.)

Alana and Jess first go to a bar, where the conversation seems innocuous, but on a second watch, I found that Krey and Nyland’s script smartly buries all sorts of plot and character nuggets in there. Alana has an aura of mystery compounded by Peterson’s Elizabeth Debicki looks and Targaryen hair, and the slow reveal of her past is one of the film’s treasures. After the bar, they stroll into the woods, where they find a stone altar.

Jess and Alana were not only best friends, but they were best witch friends, in a coven together, which is mega-badass and very cool. Only somewhere between high school and now, Jess lost her faith: “You get older and your problems get bigger. There’s things magic can’t fix. Or shouldn’t. If you can’t use it when it matters, then….” And Alana catches her: “Hey. It doesn’t have to be so fraught. It can just be beautiful. Or fun.”

It’s such a loaded interplay that encapsulates what’s so fun about Summoners: The story is so many things. A tale of a woman being pulled back in for One Last Job. A witchy coming-of-age story with an unmistakable queer subtext. A trauma puzzle the film takes 90 minutes to reassemble. But above everything, it’s a treatise on the nature of magic. Alana sees it as white gowns and crackling bonfires in the moonlight. Jess sees it as a childish illusion. Neither one is right, but the script so perfectly sets up these opposing viewpoints and then watches them grow, change, clash, and reconcile.

Ugh. Just thinking about the scene of them standing in the clearing in the moonlight chatting about their approaches to magic — very somber, very casual, with cricket chirps in the background — bring back this amazing October vibe. And it’s not Halloween without some blood magic.

Blood Magic

The script crackles with wit and joviality, from a Tish Thawer joke — doing a frivolous ritual, Jess remarks that they feel like “the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” — to Dad reading “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” for a guys’ book club he started. Were the film more ridiculous and overtly comedic, it’d make a great modern Practical Magic. But as it stands, it’s very subtle, very indie-drama, and very shoestrings in terms of budget — all points in its favor. You appreciate the quirks more that way. The little red potions they drink to bring about hallucinations, or the way Jess lifts a pizza box out of the fridge with two hands and kicks the door shut, holding the box against her chest in a fun little bit of casual choreography.

This sly, confident little film is so good at lulling you into this mellow frame of mind that, child, you have no idea how scary and eerie Summoners is capable of being until that hour mark comes. The scares feel earned. Shocking. Personal. Summoners out of nowhere come out swinging with a late-night baking scene that made me jump 10 feet out of my slippers and cling to a hanging light like Scooby-Doo.

There’s blood magic in this bitch, and something called a “Sin-Eater.” Krey approaches the ritual scenes like action set pieces, each one a carefully choreographed dance of close-ups, faint sounds, and flickering candles. (My favorite stylistic flourish of Krey’s is that he’ll keep cutting back to Alana’s cat for reaction shots.) A shot of two women smearing blood on the rim of a bowl is very sensual, sapphic, and feminist, but it’s also just a gorgeous, slow punctuation mark on an already tense, giddy sequence.

When secrets start coming to the fore and friendships dissolve, Summoners maintains its intrigue and tonal brilliance. (Oddly, this has the same inciting incident, it turns out, as Halloween Ends.) The film’s second act, sandwiched between two delicious summoning rituals, turns into something like Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt as we see Alana’s side of things, how the town’s turned against her, and how mass hysteria has marked her as an outcast like, well, a witch. The film’s small-town vibes and concentration on this dynamic between two women with dark pasts reminded me blissfully of 2017’s microbudget slow-burn thriller Barracuda.

In its final 20 minutes, Summoners rattles more than it ought to — I’m not quite sure what to make of a story in which two white women think they have it so bad that they summon a demon to give one of them whip lashings on her back — and the film overall lacks a certain bit of polish, particularly in the music, which more often than not evokes a D&D campaign soundtrack rather than a film score. But the Sin-Eater conjuring theme is dope, the sound is rattling, and the cat’s adorable, so all of Summoners’ sins feel more or less forgivable.

Conclusion:

Summoners is an efficient, low-budget chiller perfect for an autumn night or a blood moon. I feel like so many horror movies and witch movies in particular try to awe us with magic — with CG effects and painstakingly rendered phantasms. But Summoners focuses on more mundane magic. It dedicates time to exploring the characters and their emotions and relationships. Wounds fester and rot before being healed. Unspoken truths can still sting. Summoners ultimately make us believe what Jess says after a late-night blood magic ritual: “Life hurts. You can’t just magic it away.”

What do you think of Summoners, and what’s your favorite witch movie? Let us know in the comments below.

Summoners premiered at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on Oct. 18, 2022. It does not yet have a release plan.

Watch Summoners