My Soul To Take is bland cinematic comfort food, evoking pleasant childhood memories of the Scream series, the type of pre-9/11 horror film that wasn’t so scary you walked out of the theater shaken. Fondly, I recall a time before Eli Roth.
And of course it’s in converted 3-D. It’s mostly decent although not used in any particularly impressive way. The textbook for using 3-D in a horror film is 1953’s House of Wax, which had a screening at Film Forum’s Vintage 3-D Film Festival this summer. Important to the 3-D frame is composition, so that a vat of boiling wax viewed from a certain angle appears to jump off the frame and inhabit the black masking around the screen. There are no such tricks in Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take.
What we have is a serial killer living with his wife and child in the sleepy town of Riverton. 7 children were born, some prematurely on a very busy night at Riverton General Hospital. Naturally the body of said serial killer was never found, but it was assumed he died in an ambulance crash.
The film proceeds as all horror films do – teens that are slightly better looking than my friends and I were at 16 turn against each other, go crazy, and we lose count of the bodies on the floor. Aside from a kid known as Bug, who builds giant vomiting bird suits, we don’t care nearly enough about everyone else.
Wes Craven, who will be directing Scream 4, has made this film many times. It is beneath him and he’s credited as the screenwriter. When a filmmaker is phoning it in, what’s there for me to do? Allegory can be read into anything, but I feel as if this film was created to be little more than a product. Decent 3-D isn’t enough to draw me to a bland horror film, at least if Uwe Boll had been behind the lens, there would have been some unintended fun to have been had. Craven has made the worst type of film, a boring one.
3 out of 10
What did you think of My Soul To Take?