Soul’s Chapel review

By Simon Thompson

Director Jake C.Young and writer David Daring’s Souls Chapel, is an ambitious spaghetti western-infused horror movie limited by its budget and script issues from fully realising its potential. Southern gothic, horror, and spaghetti westerns are a surprisingly effective combination when done right (see From Dusk Till Dawn, American Vampire, and Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher) so I went into Souls Chapel with high expectations and wanting to give it a fair shake, yet it still left me feeling cold. 

Taking inspiration from Kentucky legend, Souls Chapel focuses on The Drifter (Jake C.Young), a mysterious cowboy wandering through the woods of Kentucky in search of gold. When a snowstorm hits, The Drifter takes shelter in a local church named Souls Chapel, only to discover that he might have been better off facing the elements outside. 

Souls Chapel is a movie which wears its influences on its sleeve, as a huge spaghetti western fan it didn’t take me long to spot the homages to classics in the genre such as Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence. Unlike those masterpieces however, Young and Daring’s script and direction fails to fully grasp the rule of show don’t tell – bloating the film’s short 1 hr and 20 minute running time with an overabundance of expository dialogue and scenes. 

Jake C.Young does a solid job acting as the film’s protagonist, yet unlike other spaghetti western heroes such as Harmonica, The Man With No Name or pretty much any character Franco Nero has ever played, he makes The Drifter too knowable, lacking that mysteriously impenetrable charisma that makes a spaghetti western protagonist so engaging. 

Technically, Souls Chapel is poorly lit to a point of being garish. The outdoor scenes have a seasickness-inducing blue filter on them, which makes them hard to watch, and the interior location of the church is far too dark for you to be able to see what is going on at all. While Young’s camerawork is perfectly serviceable, the cinematography is bland to a point of almost being colourless, and as working in both spaghetti westerns and horror are genres which depend on colour to build effective atmosphere, you’re left unable to engage with the action.

With a longer running time, better lighting and cinematography, and a larger budget Souls Chapel could have been an entertaining and interesting genre hybrid, but sadly Young and Daring’s film falls disappointingly flat.