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VT actress Kerrin Jeromin in a scene from Dead Creek
Dead Creek is a 2,858-acre area of swampland located in Addison County, Vermont, near the southern tip of Lake Champlain. It’s the perfect place for a horror movie: dark, dank, and isolated, not to mention the fact that it’s called Dead Creek.
Mike Turner would agree. A native of Vermont, he lived in the Addison area for several years, inspiring his most recent horror flick, titled Dead Creek. It’s the story of two sisters who get lost during a nature hike and find themselves on the banks of the creek. With twilight approaching, they are forced to cross the eerie marsh, bringing back memories of their younger sister who died at that very spot, the victim of a creature from the VT lagoon.
The film is only 16 minutes long, but Turner achieves a palpable tension through the simplest means: mist rising off the creek, a blurred figure darting across the screen in the foreground, a digital photo montage in which something seems to be peeking through the reeds.
The one mistake Turner makes is to actually show the swamp creature, a choice that dissipates the film’s built-up suspense and downplays the metaphysical aspects of the story. I’m reminded of the Vincente Minnelli film The Bad and the Beautiful, in which Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan, playing a movie producer and a director saddled with a studio project called “The Doom of the Cat Men,” are shown a series of ragged cat suits by the costume department. “Put five men dressed like cats on the screen, what do they look like?” Douglas asks. “Like five men dressed like cats,” Sullivan shoots back without missing a beat. Their decision to never show the cat men is a thinly veiled reference to the Jacques Tourneur B-movie classic Cat People, in which he created an unbearable amount of tension through the mere suggestion of terror.
But for a short film, Dead Creek is a surprisingly thoughtful examination of memory and guilt, and its open-ended conclusion will stay with you, demanding a second viewing. And there’s also a moment about a dozen minutes in that will make the faint of heart scream out loud – the true test of a good horror movie.
Dead Creek will be screened as part of the Vermont Horror Fest, taking place October 30 at The Outer Space Café in the Burlington Factory Studios on Flynn Ave.
Dead Creek
USA; 2009; 16 min;
ill-Co Productions
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Directed by: Mike Turner
Produced by: Travis J. Kehoe,
Mike Turner
Screenplay by: Travis J. Kehoe,
Mike Turner
Cinematography by: Georgia Pantazopoulos,
Mark Covino
Music by: Jason Livesay
Cast: Kerrin Jeromin; Taryn Hough; Max Cook;
Laura Dunn; Grace Experience Blewer; Ryan Kehoe
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