By K.E. Roberts / October 29, 2026
Chiller
Directed by Wes Craven
CBS (1985)
Those of a certain age know of cryonics because, for many years, we believed Walt Disney’s head was frozen when he died so that one day, God willing, medical science would advance to such a degree that his brain would be reanimated and attached to some kind of fantastical Imagineered puppet-body, perhaps 10 feet tall and dressed like a pirate, in which the fun-loving Übermensch would endeavor to remake our drab and dangerous real world into a utopian playland where there is no more pain and no one ever dies. In the ‘80s, the idea that the near- and far-flung future would be a pleasure to wake up to was pretty commonplace—even our dystopias looked cool. Today, as the actual dystopia of Trumpland metastasizes, not so much; and instead of the quaintly laughable pursuit of freeze-drying human bodies to chase immortality, we get calculating and creepy tech millionaires who attempt to “conquer death” by consuming nothing but broccoli, tracking their erections, and going to bed alone every night at 8:30 pm sharp—no exceptions.
An engraving with the words “They Shall See Tomorrow” hangs outside the cryonics facility at the beginning of Wes Craven’s Chiller (1985), probably the most damning treatment of the ultra-pseudoscientific practice that has ever made it to the screen. Inside Control Room 2, there’s a problem. Fog swirls under a long row of cryonic tubes as a night watchman (Edward Blackoff) notices something amiss with number 59: too much condensation. He taps the alarm siren a couple of times (a longstanding trope) and it goes off, belatedly; “he’s thawing fast,” the guard tells his supervisor on the emergency phone. The body is rushed to the hospital where we meet Mrs. Marion Creighton (Beatrice Straight): it’s her beloved son, Miles (Michael Beck), 10-years dead, who is warming to room temperature, wrapped tightly in foil like a Swanson’s TV dinner. “They’re going to give my son back to me,” Marion tells the dubious Reverend Penny (Paul Sorvino), a close family friend who assumed Miles’s body had been buried at the funeral he conducted. Marion surreptitiously had him frozen, and thank God she did. “This really is the age of miracles, isn’t it?”
Miles, of course, is revived. He’s a vegetable for a good while, and the doctors and hospital execs want to unplug him. Marion indignantly refuses (“he’s my whole life”), and continual body massaging from the nurses finally gets his blood boiling, with some nifty Stan Winston effects showing the transformation. Back at the palatial family estate, because of course the Creightons are fabulously rich, we discover that something is not quite right with Miles. He is—I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to say it—quite cold, inside and out. He’s shivering under the covers with the floor heater blasting, taking long hot showers, throwing back the cognac. When Clarence Beeson (Dick O’Neill) stops by Miles’s bedroom to invite him to come back to his dead father’s company, Miles acknowledges him only as a pest and is disgusted that Clarence is still loyally “looking after the family’s interests.” That night Miles kills his old dog, Happy, who sniffs evil and sneaks into the house to do him harm. (The family mutt in Craven’s previous TV horror, 1984’s Invitation to Hell, had the same scent for the demonic.)
Rightfully installed at the head of the boardroom table, Miles boredly listens to Clarence sum up the annual report and announce the company’s 6% profit margin. “I think you’ll all agree that in these serious economic times,” says Clarence, “this is very, very good.” Miles thinks it’s “pitiful,” however, and questions the company’s middling donations to burn centers, local churches, and other questionable causes. You see, Miles died during the bumbling Ford presidency of whimpering Whip Inflation Now, but he was resurrected into Ronnie Reagan’s glorious Morning in America, where the sun shone on every man but only the rich got to soak it in. PR pro Ms. Kenyon (Laura Johnson) wants bigger profits too but questions the new president’s ditching of the company’s “serviceable public image.” “The marketplace is cold-blooded,” Miles remarks, “it doesn’t care.” Miles touts “efficiency” as the driver of profit, and Clarence’s name is being removed from the lobby directory before the board meeting is over. When the old man finds Miles that night at the office and asks him to reconsider, Miles forces him to chase him up the stairs, where he has a heart attack and dies. The scenes are not subtle, but neither was the plunder of the middle class by Wall Street.
Marion confronts Miles at home—she knows Clarence was fired but not that he’s dead—and he promises to give the old man his job back in the morning. “I knew you would,” gushes Marion. The only one who suspects Miles is a psychopath is the hapless Stacey (Jill Schoelen), the young woman Marion adopted after Miles died because she was lonely. She’s more or less treated like the help, and Miles peeps at her undressing through a hole in the bedroom closet. In the next scene, if you doubted his lechery, he blackmails Ms. Kenyon into sexual servitude: “You sell it just like the rest. It’s only your price we haven’t established.” Our friend Reverend Penny shows up at the company offices after regular donations to his church have been “terminated.” Ms. Kenyon, repentant, delivers the bad news, and the Reverend sees the bruises on her face. He wants to call the police, but Ms. Kenyon refuses: “You don’t know what he is.”
The Reverend is brooding during his regular game of cards with Mrs. Bunch (Anne Seymour). He knows the soul goes to “some hereafter” when the body dies, but what happens if a man dies and is buried, and years later is somehow reanimated? “Would the soul be required to rejoin the body? Or would it remain on the other side?” The Reverend gets his answer when Miles sneaks up on him during a late night walk:
I’ll tell you what’s on the other side: nothing. Absolutely nothing. You die and there’s simply darkness… No streets of gold. No harps, no halos, no angels and saints. It’s all here—so you better live it up, holy man.
The Reverend calls him a liar and chases him to his car, where his scarf gets stuck in the door and Miles slowly and gleefully accelerates, seemingly killing the holy man. But not quite! Marion rushes to the hospital, where he has just enough energy to tell her that Miles tried to kill him because “the body you revived is empty. He has no soul.” Had the Reverend been in another line of work, he might have mentioned the possibility that Miles was telling the truth: he never had a soul, and neither do the rest of us, which is in fact the cold hard premise that motivates people to part with upwards of $80,000 to be preserved in a tube and tucked away in a Michigan strip mall next to the Tastee-Freez.
Marion finally accepts that Miles may not be the person he once was when she comes home and finds him attempting to rape Stacey. She lures him into the meat locker, where the cops finish him off in typical slasher fashion, and apologizes to Stacey for treating her like a second-class citizen in her own home. At the hospital, the Reverend is comatose: it could go either way. “There must be something we can do,” a desperate Marion tells the doctor (Craig Richard Nelson) who revived Miles. “There is one thing you could do,” the doc says, with a dramatic turn of the head, “you could pray.” Marion nods, teary-eyed, as if this is the first time talking to God has occurred to her. Cut to the cryonics facility, where the night watchman once again has a problem. Multiple alarms sound, a tube collapses, there’s an explosion, and fog mingled with smoke fills the room.
Yes, melodrama abounds, and the story follows a too-often-tread path that leads directly back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902). And yet there is something new here that’s sparked by the clash between cryonics and Christianity: writer J.D. Feigelson, who also penned TV horror classic Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), floats the idea that a successful revival after cryonic suspension might solve, more or less, the question of the afterlife and the immortal soul. If the soul goes to heavenly paradise after death and subsequently reenters the reanimated mortal coil, would that not be a special kind of hell? And if the soul remains with God, and only the body returns, then we’re left with the equivalent of living death. Either way, it’s really no surprise that Miles acts the way he does. Chiller rises above typical TV fare not only because of Wes Craven’s ability to bring these existential questions to life, but because of Michael Beck’s (best known for his role as gang leader Swan in 1979’s The Warriors) deliciously sinister performance as Miles, who prefigures the narcissistic and sadistic Patrick Bateman of 1991’s American Psycho.
As we see playing out with AI, rapid technological advancement without moral compass is a match made in hell. And the techno-messianists are already playing at immortality: very soon, they say, we’ll have the means to extend lifespans practically forever, upload neural networks into computers, create “cloud-based consciousness”; in fact, we must evolve into cyborgs, lest we become “house cats” to our AI overlords. The problem with the boys in Silicon Valley and the billionaires who prop them up is the same as it ever was: they have the brains, but they don’t have the soul.
