In which we unfairly compare two soulful psycho-slashers from the 2010s: My Soul To Take (2010) and Personal Shopper (2017).
Revisiting My Soul To Take was, initially, an exciting prospect. Last perused personally not long after its release in 2010, it lingered hazily in my memory – a lost soul itself, captured only in jagged edits, like a frenzied, long-haired killer, a teenage cast with an unusual dynamic, and a melancholy ending.
Surely, as the last film he’d both written and directed, My Soul To Take should represent Wes Craven’s last word on a genre he’d helped define: the slasher. His subsequent and final film was one too, of course, but Scream 4 had a reputation as a commercial compromise, relying less on Craven’s craft as an auteur, and more on his expertise (or dogged experience, you might say) at holding the pieces together.
Beyond Craven’s career, 2010 provided My Soul To Take with an interesting, if not auspicious, backdrop. His contemporary, John Carpenter, offered up The Ward, his first original slasher since the seminal Halloween, but it received a miniscule release and remains his own final film to date. Looking for other standout horror films in a year seething with video-nasty remakes is hardly inspiring; the journey will drive you from The Crazies to I Spit On Your Grave, by way of a spluttering new spin on Craven’s own A Nightmare On Elm Street.
So what of My Soul To Take and its take on horror in the inaugural decade of the 21st century? In truth, returning to it resulted in no revelations for me. After a hectic but undeniably vigorous opening, I realised, like the critics I’d doubted, that the script has little grip on the concepts it wants to explore. The afterlife, the soul, reincarnation... these butterfly notions create more wonder when glimpsed in the air than caught on a pin, but weaving them into a teen-horror milieu probably requires a keen perspective. Here, we get references to mythologies from Indigenous America, Haiti, and heavy metal, but nothing that teases any real suspense or mystery from them.
Entertained but thus disappointed, I turned to the director’s commentary, only to hear, wherever I skipped, not insights into the script’s intentions, but tales of reshoots, rewrites, and all the woes in between. Craven’s post-Scream career was in this way cursed (so cursed he made a film called Cursed that was cursed with reshoots) but I’ll never not think of him as the college professor of horror cinema – literate, cardigan-wearing, and avuncular. I wish revisiting My Soul To Take had revealed a masterplan behind the bedlam, but even the melancholy ending that once left me with a wistful glow turned out to be an alternative ending from the Blu-ray’s suspiciously copious bonus footage.
Even worse, where did all this leave me in terms of the new blog I wanted to start – the one right here? The more I picked and poked at the fragile fibres of My Soul To Take, the more it collapsed into something I wanted to put quietly back into its box. And that might have been the end of things, if it hadn’t been for another film I rewatched a week later, on a Saturday morning whim.
Personal Shopper has more plot threads than plot, I’ll admit. But it tackles slippery concepts with the confidence of, well, Wes Craven walking onto the set of another Scream sequel. We have bereavement, spiritualism, and ghostly manifestation, all trotted out in a ten-minute opening scene that has barely any dialogue and is shot mostly in darkness. If you’re not drawn in, I’ll understand, but you’ll be missing out on murder, voyeurism, and the most intense texting/stalking sequence I’ve ever seen in a film. (I mean, seriously, it's like hacking into Brian De Palma’s WhatsApp.)
Hardly offscreen for the remainder of the film, Kristen Stewart lives a life I’m not sure I’d want, but which I find very easy to watch. Cast adrift by an aloof employer, she’s always alone, on trains, in restaurants, researching art and authors, picking out expensive clothes in Parisian quarters; or just existing, really, which calls into question everything, since the film is all about existence – of the soul, of ghosts, of yourself.
If it sounds vague and arty, it can be, but it’s also eventful and suspenseful, and director Olivier Assayas isn’t afraid to tackle a tricky visual. Unlike My Soul To Take, it’s a horror film freed from the horror genre. Where that film shrivels to a close, Personal Shopper expands, risking a final few steps into the unknown and ultimately resolving more strikingly.
Of course, beyond my revisiting of them over two successive weekends, the films have nothing to do with each other. Sadly, Wes Craven’s soul was released from his body a year before Personal Shopper was released into cinemas, so we’ll never know what he might have made of the film (an assumption based on my own view of the afterlife). But I find the uncertainty of Assayas’s vision more honest, and certainly more compelling – enough to breathe some life into this blog that nearly never was.
