Wes Craven’s Midlife Crisis, Now in 3D
Let’s get this out of the way: Wes Craven was a horror legend. The man gave us A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and a lifetime of therapy bills. But in 2010, he also gave us My Soul to Take — a movie so confused, so bafflingly tone-deaf, it feels less like a film and more like a midlife crisis with a studio budget.
This was Craven’s big return to the writer-director-producer triple threat. Unfortunately, it plays like a greatest hits album from someone who forgot their own lyrics. It’s got teenagers, a serial killer, supernatural nonsense, and… a duck costume. Yes, a duck costume.
By the end, you’ll be begging Freddy Krueger to invade this dream and put it out of its misery.
The Plot: A Killer, Seven Souls, and Zero Logic
The movie begins with Abel Plenkov — a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder (because why handle mental illness sensitively when you can use it as a slasher origin story?). Abel learns that he’s the “Riverton Ripper,” a serial killer who enjoys murdering people and, apparently, confusing the audience.
He kills his wife, a psychiatrist, and possibly a goldfish before being shot and hauled into an ambulance. Then, because subtlety died long before the opening credits, he revives, slashes a paramedic, and crashes the ambulance. Cue fire. Cue chaos. Cue 3D title screen that looks like a PowerPoint effect.
Sixteen years later, seven kids — all born the night Abel died — are dubbed the “Riverton Seven,” because nothing says “fun childhood” like being linked to a local murderer. These teens have the usual horror-movie attributes: The Jock, The Religious One, The Nerd, The Artist, The Blind Guy (yes, really), The Pretty Girl, and our hero, Bug (Max Thieriot), whose name sounds like something you call pest control for.
Every year, the teens gather to “kill” a Ripper puppet in a ritual that looks like a rejected Goosebumps episode. Naturally, Bug screws it up, and naturally, people start dying.
From there, things spiral into pure nonsense. Bug starts channeling the personalities of the dead — part Final Destination, part Freaky Friday, all headache. His classmates drop like flies, and the killer turns out to be… his best friend Alex. Or maybe Bug. Or maybe all of them. Or maybe none of them. Honestly, at some point, even the killer stopped caring.
The Characters: Dead on Arrival
Max Thieriot’s Bug is our hero — a wide-eyed teen who looks perpetually confused, which, to be fair, is appropriate. He spends most of the film muttering cryptic lines about souls, birds, and destiny. By the end, he’s somehow possessed by six other people and possibly his dad’s ghost, which is either poetic or a symptom of untreated schizophrenia.
His sister Fang (Emily Meade), because of course her name is Fang, exists solely to yell at him like a gothic older sibling in a CW pilot that never got picked up. She’s the kind of character who smokes dramatically indoors and probably writes fanfiction about herself.
The rest of the “Riverton Seven” are stock photos of people who will die soon. There’s the blind kid who senses evil but can’t sense the script collapsing, the jock who bullies people like it’s his job, and the religious girl who literally prays for the audience’s survival.
Even the adults are caricatures. Raul Esparza plays Abel with the kind of overacting you usually only see in community theater productions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Frank Grillo shows up as a detective, probably as part of a court-ordered obligation to be in every crime movie made between 2008 and 2016.
The Horror: Soul-Crushing, But Not in a Good Way
Remember when Wes Craven’s scares were smart, sharp, and subversive? My Soul to Take is like watching a great chef forget how to boil water. The kills are dull, the suspense nonexistent, and the gore sanitized to a PG-13 polish that screams “studio interference.”
There’s a scene where the killer attacks someone in the woods. It should be terrifying. Instead, it looks like a Scooby-Doochase scene shot in the dark. The Ripper’s mask — a melted blob of plastic with eye holes — is so unthreatening it could double as a marshmallow.
And the 3D? Oh, the 3D. The movie was released during the post-Avatar “everything must be 3D” phase, which means every five minutes something flies at your face: knives, blood, tree branches, your will to live. It doesn’t add tension — it adds nausea.
The Writing: A Soul to Break
Craven’s script feels like it was written by seven different people trapped in a blender — which, fittingly, mirrors the film’s theme of multiple personalities. There’s supernatural mumbo-jumbo, serial killer tropes, high school drama, and what might be a half-hearted attempt at social commentary.
The dialogue is an unholy hybrid of teen slang and fortune-cookie philosophy:
“You can’t kill me — I’m you.”
“Souls never die, they just move on.”
“Dude, stop channeling dead people at lunch.”
It’s like Donnie Darko without the brains or bunny suit.
The film’s core mystery — who is the Ripper now? — might have worked if it followed its own rules. But Craven keeps changing the logic mid-sentence. Is the killer possessed? Reincarnated? A metaphor? The answer, apparently, is “yes, and also no.”
By the time the final twist rolls around, revealing Bug’s best friend Alex as the murderer, it’s less shocking and more of a mercy. When Bug kills him, it’s not just self-defense; it’s the script putting itself out of its misery.
The Tone: Slasher Meets Hallmark Movie
What’s truly bizarre about My Soul to Take is its tonal whiplash. One minute, we’re in a gory murder scene. The next, Bug is having a heartfelt conversation about family trauma. Then, we’re back to dream sequences involving birds. (Yes, birds. There’s an entire recurring motif about condors for no reason other than “birds are spooky, right?”)
The movie wants to be scary, emotional, and meaningful — but it ends up being none of the above. It’s as if Craven took Scream’s meta-awareness, Elm Street’s dream logic, and Shutter Island’s mental illness themes, threw them into a blender, and forgot to hit “mix.”
The Performances: Everyone’s in a Different Movie
Max Thieriot seems to think he’s in a psychological drama. Emily Meade acts like she’s in a music video. Raul Esparza performs like he’s auditioning for The Exorcist: The Musical.
Every actor is committed, but to entirely different projects. Watching them interact feels like watching a crossover between seven fan films that never met in pre-production.
The Legacy: Death by Overcomplication
It’s almost tragic. My Soul to Take could have been a solid supernatural slasher if someone had told Craven “No.” No to the 3D gimmicks. No to the soul-hopping metaphysics. No to naming your lead character Bug.
Instead, the film collapsed under the weight of its own ambition — a slasher that desperately wanted to be deep but drowned in its own metaphors. It’s The Breakfast Club meets The Exorcist, written by someone who slept through both.
Even hardcore Craven fans struggle to defend it. Sure, it’s gained a “cult following,” but so has the flat-earth movement — and both rely on denial as a coping mechanism.
Final Verdict
My Soul to Take is what happens when a horror master forgets that horror needs rules. It’s incoherent, overacted, and edited like someone accidentally dropped the film reel into a blender full of fog.
It wants to explore the human soul, but ends up proving that sometimes, it’s better left untaken.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Plastic Ripper Masks.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray this movie didn’t cost full price to keep. 💀
