My Soul to Take (2010): C

Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take opens promisingly, with a husband going mysteriously schizo – or is he actually possessed? – with a knife featuring “Vengeance” etched on its blade. After a frenzied murder spree ends with the serial killer, dubbed “The Riverton Ripper,” disappearing into the night, Craven’s story (the first one he’s penned as well as directed since 1991’s The People Under the Stairs) jumps ahead sixteen years to find the seven children born the night of the Ripper’s departure still commemorating his death while fearing his possible return. When a homeless-looking guy begins offing the kids on their birthdays and one of them, troubled Bug (Max Theiriot), starts acting more than a bit deranged, panic sweeps the high school, though for all of Craven’s suggestions that Bug is haunted by the Ripper, the filmmaker’s red herrings prove depressingly incapable of hiding the real fiend’s identity. Consequently, despite its intro and a nicely freaky mirror-image sequence involving Bug and best friend Alex (John Magaro), My Soul to Take gradually loses any trace of suspense. That’s a fatal problem, and one compounded by the fact that its story also quickly dispatches with any internal logic – characters appear and disappear on a whim (sometimes explaining their out-of-nowhere arrivals with deadening exposition), see supernatural visions for no apparent reason, and generally behave as idiotically as one would expect from stock outcast/rapist jock/angry goth/religious fundamentalist/stuck-up blond/handicapped-African-American caricatures.