The Black Sheep series looks back at the 2001 film Soul Survivors, starring Melissa Sagemiller, Eliza Dushku, and Wes Bentley
Theres always that strange transition period in horror movies where things can get lost in the shuffle. The 70s and its nihilism broke late in the decade to swerve into masked killers and the slasher genre. That heyday was far shorter than people remember but the late 80s did something similar in transitioning to straight to video smash successes and a crazy number of sequels and adaptations. That well, too, would dry up, and when Wes Craven released Scream in 1996, the landscape would shift to smart slashers and then found footage. The teen slasher era was first with things like Urban Legend, Scream sequels, Disturbing Behavior, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and hell, even Final Destination posits literal death as a slasher villain. These are more along the lines of the top shelf example but one that could qualify for a best horror movie you never saw AND a Black Sheep is Soul Survivors from 2001. Let me tell you why Soul Survivors is the teen horror Black Sheep that deserves your attention.
What is this movie anyway? Well, if you look at the DVD or happen to buy the special “Killer Cut”, you may expect this movie to be a teen slasher movie like the ones mentioned previously. On the surface level that’s what it is. After you watch it though, it is a strange mixture of Jacob’s Ladder and Carnival of Souls. That sounds a lot heavier than most critics were probably willing to give the movie credit for but that’s what I got out of it. Is it as good as either of those? Well, no. Its not the taut, emotional, well-acted, or frightening movie that Ladder is nor is it the cornerstone of American independent horror films that Carnival is. Its script from writer/director Stephen Carpenter is much more thoughtful than you’d expect. Apart from the movie not being a great flick to begin with, apparently, we even gave it a 4/10 when it first came out, it has other issues as well.
The first one is dependent on what cut you watch. The one that was theatrically released was cut for the teen audience but many of the cuts were exactly what that age demographic looks for and what they left in, the version you can watch on Tubi, is the more spiritual and metaphysical version. Its budget was 17 million which no doubt included the payments to the star power as well as the bidding war that Artisan won against Paramount and Fox. Unfortunately, that 17 million would only bring back less than 5 million, making it a monumental failure. Now part of that was certainly that A. Again, this isn’t an all time classic and B. it really wasn’t marketed well but it also had the distinction of being released 4 days before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Even if this were a great film, it would have been hard to bounce back from that national tragedy.
Going back to a lighter topic, and please literally anything but 9/11, the script was fought over by studios for a reason, or at least that’s what I’d like to tell you anyway. Stephen Carpenter isn’t a huge name and in fact this would be the last movie he directed. He also wrote and directed The Dorm That Dripped Blood from 1982, The Power from 1984, and one of my favorite Best Horrors You Never Saw, The Kindred from 1987 as one of the like 20 writers on that last one too. While the cover of the DVD and poster for the movie are generic as heck, even looking almost exactly the same as a 1998 movie called The Curve and many other teen movies of this time, they did the cast right. Four big names from the time appear in leading roles with Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Elisa Dushku, and Luke Wilson all adding to the appeal and going on to varying degrees of success.
Bentley has lately landed on big TV shows like Yellowstone and American Horror Story but was also acclaimed two years before this movie with a large role in American Beauty. His other main horror credit is in P2 as a stellar villain. Dushku was huge in Buffy and has done a ton of voiceover work but was also in Wrong Turn a couple years later in the lead and that movie still holds up. Affleck was able to escape the genre with this being his only entry and he says this is his least favorite movie that he’s ever done. Wilson has also done only one other horror movie with Vacancy, and I suppose the main thing all these actors have in common is that Soul Survivors soured them on the genre. The biggest surprise is the main character Cassie played by Melissa Sagemiller. She should have been a bigger star but mostly stayed on TV with shows like Sleeper Cell, Law and Order, and Raising the Bar. She could have been a good final girl or shown up in more comedies, but it just wasn’t to be.
The plot of the movie dives into 4 friends played by Bentley, Dushku, Sagemiller, and Affleck that also have some love threads going on between them. It starts with the friends going to a party in an old church where they see a couple men in odd masks who try to take Cassie away from the dance floor. The group leaves and after some shenanigans involving hidden love and mistaken kisses, they leave with an air of anger and suspicion about them. Cassie is driving and ends up not paying attention which gets them in a nasty car wreck involving another car. When the dust has settled, Cassie along with Annabel and Matt, played by Bentley and Dusku, are left to pick up the pieces while Affleck’s Sean was killed instantly. This is the first part of the Ladder similarities as an inciting incident ends up having branching realities where what we see is mostly a what could be mixed with a calling from reality.
Cassie is kind of a loner now with dreams of Sean as well as continuing to see the masked men she saw the night of the party and accident. She runs into Matt and Annabelle, but they are different in ways that she can’t remember or explain. Matt claims Cassie wanted to sleep with her while Annabelle seems very suspicious and up to something. Even the masked men chase her from time to time or show up at places like her swim meet, but her former friends assure here that its all in her mind. She eventually seeks shelter and help within the church where we meet Luke Wilsons’s father Jude. He is the Danny Aiello chiropractor character that adds a touch of religion to the proceedings. While the character is a guardian angel of sorts in Ladder and it’s entirely possible he doesn’t exist in the real world, Wilsons character was a man of God who we find out passed away many years ago.
The misinformation and near gaslighting that her friends give her aren’t entirely tied to one movie or the other but the masked men chasing Cassie feel a lot like Herk Harvey himself from Carnival of Souls as they are menacing and mysterious. This is taken to the next level though as the danger is real and physical instead of just ominous and constrained to the background. The paranoia and danger go hand in hand to the point where Cassie even fights back and seemingly kills one of them with a fluorescent light but of course when she brings someone back to show them the body and gore are gone. She asks Matt to take her home to her family but instead he takes her back to where everything began.
Events, minus Sean, begin to materialize again from the night of the crash but when Matt wants to kiss her, she says goodbye to him with a bottle to the noggin. She then leaves and sees Annabelle die in an eerily similar crash. She gets out of the car like a dummy and gets hit by another car before the spirit of Father Luke approaches her and eventually waking up in a hospital bed. We do get scenes of her taken by Gurney in a less than PG 13 version of Tim Robbins ordeal in Jacob’s Ladder. It turns out that Matt and Annabelle died in the original crash while Sean survived, and Cassie was put into a coma. The other car that they crashed into contained the would-be stalkers in masks and the alt girl Raven who was seducing Annabelle and tried to do the same to Cassie. This is where it branches off from both Ladder and Souls.
Apologies on spoilers for movies that are 34 and 62 years old respectively but Carnival of Souls ends with its main character revealed to be killed in an auto accident that is the inciting incident for that movie. Jacob’s Ladder similarly has all of the events seen after his Vietnam injury as a coma like fever dream of what could have been mixed with some seriously terrifying stuff. There’s lots to like here and I have to give a lot of credit to Carpenter here. He was able to mix two obvious influences on him into a teen horror movie with all of the same messages about guilt, forgiveness, letting go, and moving on that both earlier films put out there. Both films are much more beloved and well known but Soul Survivors shouldn’t just be pushed aside with other known dreck from its era.
With two different versions, alternate endings, and a unique premise and cast, I know there was a solid if not great movie to be found in there at some point. Its not going to win you over in the first viewing or overtake some of the classics, from contemporaries to originals, but Soul Survivors is a black sheep that yearns for more and just happens to, as Robert Browning would say, have its reach exceed its grasp. Give it a shot and then watch what inspired it to really see what it wanted to accomplish.
A couple of the previous episodes of The Black Sheep can be seen at the bottom of this article. To see more, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!