Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take should have been a horror event. Instead, it was released 15 years ago to baffled audiences, disappointed reviews, and accompanying low box office. Now that its era has passed, however, and its place at the tail-end of Craven’s career is clearer, maybe the film itself has come of age.
This was the first feature written and directed by Craven since 1994, when he sent off the Nightmare on Elm Street series and dry-ran the Scream series simultaneously with New Nightmare. The loopy concept of My Soul to Take essentially crossbreeds Craven’s two signature franchises. In its opening sequence, the movie reveals that a serial killer called the Ripper is a man suffering from multiple personality disorder who is subsequently caught and killed. That same night, seven babies are born at the local hospital.
Fast forward 16 years, the so-called “Riverton Seven” are all teenagers, loosely bound by their shared sort-of history and an annual superstitious ritual where the Ripper is re-killed in effigy. Some say the seven kids might even reflect different souls that took turns inhabiting the Ripper’s body. Naturally, those teenagers start getting picked off, one by one.
So on one hand, there’s a masked killer stalking and killing teenagers, even at one point making a menacing phone call. On the other, there’s a group of teenagers haunted by their hometown’s gruesome past. The combination of Scream-style tactile stabs and some Nightmare-style hallucinations adds a clever twist to the whodunit. For example, while it would normally make sense to assume that closely following the meek kid nicknamed “Bug” (Max Thierot) would count as an alibi for him. But as Bug starts to see his fellow Riverton Seven classmates in strange places after they’ve died — mirrors especially — it becomes clear there’s some greater subjectivity in play. It also, alongside the hastily delivered (yet murky) exposition, makes My Soul to Take more than a little confusing.
Given that Craven immediately followed the film with the relative safety of Scream 4 six months later, one might assume this was a troubled production subject to studio meddling like Cursed. That aptly named werewolf movie was subject to endless Harvey Weinstein interference and reshoots, and Craven quickly followed it with the back-to-basics thrills of Red Eye, probably his best post-Scream film. But My Soul to Take was not a Cursed situation. Craven never badmouthed the movie or his experience making it. In fact, in an interview timed to Scream 4, he said this of the film’s miserable reviews: “When you do a film like My Soul to Take and people think it sucks, that hurts. We put a lot of work into it and it’s a good film, but you go on.”
It’s easy to understand those hurt feelings — and equally easy to understand the bad reviews. My Soul to Take is a deeply strange movie, and not in a patient, atmosphere-building way. Exposition, characterization, and “colorful” dialogue tumble out in confusing rushes. Craven’s writing feels rusty, the gears grinding especially audibly when he’s approximating the teenage sniping of the Scream screenplays. For all the rapid-fire back-and-forth and the movie’s compressed timeline (most of it takes place over the course of 24 hours), it feels weirdly drawn out. On top of that, the acting from its young stars doesn’t have the kind of clarity needed to really convey the idea of different souls sharing bodies.
And yet! As with most Craven films, there’s something eerie and memorable about My Soul to Take. The author and critic Scout Tafoya, as part of his Unloved video series, reads the film as autobiographically personal for Craven. Specifically, he sees the twisted serial-killer soul that may be nagging at and altering these teens as analogous to the dark creative impulses Craven may have felt during his horror-heavy career. It’s a fascinating take, but it’s also not the only way to enjoy the film.
There’s something else here about the mutability, and sometimes nastiness, of teenage identity. Many of the Rivertown Seven appear simultaneously disgusted with and obsessed with each other. Max and his bestie Alex (John Magaro) discuss their lust for Brittany (Paulina Olszynski), but it seems obligatory and disconnected, despite supposedly knowing her for years. Penelope (Zena Grey) is initially portrayed as an adherent Christian with a firm belief in heaven and especially the brimstone of hell, but by the end she sounds more fatalistically woo-woo than that. (She’s also one of the more likable and empathetic characters, a surprise for Craven who, as Tafoya points out, had been subject to judgmental scolding over the impure contents of his work.) The school’s fearsome bully Fang (Emily Meade), who controls a small army of jock minions, is a goth-looking girl. Nerdy outcast Bug bears a strange physical resemblance to handsome, popular Brandon (Nick Lashaway). It all suggests a certain doomy impermanence, the temporary nature of high school social order turned borderline nihilistic.
This isn’t on the level of Nightmare on Elm Street. But coming in 2010, on the heels of a decade lousy with middling horror remakes (in fact, the ill-fated Nightmare on Elm Street remake came out just six months earlier) and the drecky remains of the post-Scream teen horror boom, My Soul to Take probably should have been better appreciated than the likes of Stay Alive or Boogeyman. In one particularly strange scene, Bug and Alex unveil their biology project by dressing Alex as a massive California Condor, terrorizing their classmates and eventually splattering Brandon with some unknown substance. They extol the bird’s stamina and its ability to feed off of death. In moments like these, My Soul to Take feels like both a critique of itself and a declaration of perverse horror-making pride.