Darkest Soul (1994)

 

Director: Doug Ulrich

Cast: Al Darago as Tommy; Jeff Witte as Mark; Heather Brown as Heather; Doug Ulrich as Rick; Kevin Rogers as George Schultz; Karen Coker as Sue

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Following up Scary Tales (1993), a shot on video horror anthology from Baltimore, Maryland, its director Doug Ulrich decided to follow up with a more focused production. You can see this in how, with absolute respect for Scary Tales’ charms, so much has changed. Whilst that film, readapting ideas from even Doug Ulrich’s teenage short films like the segment about Satan’s necklace, and a short prototype version around thirty minutes¹, still felt like a production for all its precursors that was put together with duck tape and hope, Darkest Soul focused on one plot, and feels more focused in general even in how it is made.

As a result, this is more a drama in truth than a horror movie, which makes this paradoxically more of a challenge to appreciate. Opening at a funeral, we follow two male friends, Mark (Jeff Witte) and Tommy (Al Darago). Mark is a regular Joe, Tommy is a motor biker, or merely likes leather jackets and shades, with the pair constantly being fired from jobs because Tommy is anti-authoritarian, like spitting into the freshly grounded mince at spite a female customer in a supermarket, whilst Mark tags along,. Tommy is the “Darkest Soul” of the title, someone who after an upbringing of a domineering father is becoming more immoral in his behavior as the film goes along. When a man from the local cemetery offers the pair jobs as gravediggers, the downward spiral begins as Tommy and Mark start to steal from corpses, their first jeweler taken to a store, with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart vinyl in the back as an actual store, for $30 dollars and an unregistered handgun, to be followed by more corpse robbing and a decline for the pair to someone’s doom.

This set up nearly takes thirty minutes to reach, half the length of an hour long film, which presents the potential problem, the biggest, for viewers especially if they were expecting a Shot-on-Video horror film. It does begin to escalate as it goes along, sleazy in its own way as Tommy’s downward spiral includes (implied) necrophilia as he drags Mark down with him, a morality tale where any horror to this drama becomes a hallucinatory conclusion. Fed on fear and drugs, the ending, and that being all the horror of this film to justify the genre tag, will disappoint but for me befits this morality tale this is going for. It was interesting to see Darkest Soul, if a real curveball, especially as it still comes from the same people behind Scary Tales. Even if more straight-faced, this follows the previous film in the script being full of cursing and memorable insults, whilst this brings a sudden increase in explicit sexual content too, all meant as part of the storytelling but likely as much to sell the film. It stands out to as it is rarer in SOV cinema to see as not anyone may be comfortable doing actual nudity, especially not trained actresses and actors, something apparent in Scary Tales itself with the most modest and carefully shot scene for a main actress in a segment with her in a bathtub of water, contrasting this where there are figures who are more comfortable with this.

It is also, despite being a lot more cohesive than Scary Tales a lot more difficult to sell, the ultimate iron as, honestly shambolic in a charming way, its spiritual predecessor still had the advantage of sellability as a gory horror film, with no gory prosthetic effects to be seen in Darkest Soul, and being a psychotronic mass of horror you can sell as a cult film. Darkest Soul is to be appreciated for a slower experience, the creator Doug Ulrich proving they could make a film with a proper story, but this is definitely a work you would have benefitted more from, as most will, if you come to this after Scary Tales or a similar tale, and are prepared for something significantly more subdued.

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1) Made available thankfully through the American Genre Film Archive Blu-Ray release of Scary Tales, which included Darkest Soul and the early work.