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When reviewing movies, it's sometimes hard to judge them fairly by the mediums they were created for. For instance, to come down as hard on a TV-movie created on a small budget as you do a bigger one like the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake would be unjust. That's how I tried to look at Chiller's Dead Souls.

Johnny Petrie (Jesse James) inherits an old farmhouse on his 18th birthday from a family he didn't even know he had. Tired of living under the thumb of his overprotective aunt (Geraldine Hughes), he decides to visit his boyhood home and solve the mystery as to who he really is. Upon arriving, he discovers his father (J.H. Torrance Downes) was a local preacher in the small Maine town. He went crazy one night and murdered his entire family, leaving the restless spirits of his mother (Elizabeth Irene) and siblings (Kyle Donnery...

Reviewed by By Colleen Wanglund, MoreHorror.com

I don’t like the Chiller channel….I mean I really don’t like it. They edit for television, have too many commercials and/or promos and the movies they make generally suck. However, I was pleasantly surprised with Chiller’s original film Dead Souls (2012) based on the novel of the same name by Michael Laimo.

I’ll even go so far as to say that I had higher-than-usual expectations for this one and was pleased to see those expectations met. You see, I know Michael and while hanging out at the Horrorfind Convention this past September I got to talk to him a bit about the movie. He explained some of the adaptations made so that the story could be turned into a coherent re-telling for a roughly two hour runtime. He also told me that he did have a say in...

Here’s hoping to never inheriting an old, long-abandoned, and ramshackle house. They only bring trouble. Best to just sell it and pretend like you never owned it. Of course, then there would be no movie.

In Chiller’s original movie Dead Souls, airing on Friday, October 12th, the aforementioned home is the Conroy farm. In the prologue the family patriarch kills his family one at a time, starting with his wife while declaring that “it’s time for the final step.” He then proceeds to murder his two older children in highly disturbing fashion, slitting his daughter’s throat and hitting his son over the head with a blunt instrument.

That leaves only the newborn Brian, who has been safely hidden by his older brother. Unable to complete the task, Benjamin Conroy (J.H. Torrance Downes) nails his dead family and himself to crosses in the barn. Why he did...