The 2001 thriller Knight Chills deals with the frightening relationship between role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and supernatural murder. Even though it was released nearly two decades after the link between role playing and Satanism was supported by various (possibly crazy) religious leaders, Knight Chills is a terrifyingly realistic investigation of how such a hobby can destroy lives.
As predicted, your universe's critics are not chilled by Knight Chills. For example, reviewer mike3018 writes, “The story, acting, script, camera work, and sets, were among the worst I've ever suffered through.” Reviewer votok writes, “Terrible Dialog, Abysmal Line Delivery, Truly HORRIBLE lighting and filming, and Zero Acting ability from all involved. And a hopelessly amateur plot to top it all off. What a complete mess!” And reviewer samiam4evajuliannasmann writes, “This film just doesn't have any good parts to it at all. The "actors" are all so stiff and fail to portray any character reality at all, so you don't really feel for them or care about the story at all.”
Read on for the truth about Knight Chills...
A young man named John opens a file cabinet full of drawings, stuffs a few of them into a duffel bag, then leaves his house over the protests of his mother. After he is outside, the bespectacled John mumbles under his breath, “You old sea hag.” Then he drives through the snow to another house, where a fantasy role playing game is in session. After he is attacked with snowballs by two young men, John climbs the stairs down to the basement, where he is caught mumbling by role-player Zac. “Dude, you have got to lay off the heavy drugs,” Zac says.
“I don’t do drugs, Zac,” John replies.
“Then you should think about starting,” Zac jokes, “because you are one whacked individual.”
Before the role playing game starts, the two young men who threw snowballs at John are already in the basement (somehow) and begin teasing him. The dungeon master, a man in his early thirties, asks John seriously and worriedly, “Your mother doesn’t know you’re gaming here, does she?”
“No, I told her I was going to the library to research a paper.”
“Good, good,” replies the dungeon master, Jack, a history teacher. “After that last time when she found those gaming books, she gave me a call. The whole school system thinks I’ve got something evil going on here with my students.”
One of the bullies says matter-of-factly, “Yeah, they always think devil worship when it comes to role-playing anyway.” (Clearly in your universe role playing games are much more sinister than in mine.)
As everyone sits down at the table to play Pandemonium (not Dungeons & Dragons), Zac quips, “Now, the Rubik’s Cube, that’s the devil’s handiwork if I ever saw it.”
There follows a montage of game playing — the lighting of candles and rolling of dice is backed by mysterious, sinister music.
As the game progresses, one of the bullies jokingly pushes against John’s fictional horse, so John’s character retaliates, knocking the bully’s character off its own fictional horse. John says, ambiguously either as his character or as himself, “If you ever mess with me ever again, I will kill you.”
Everyone starts arguing at the table, nearly coming to blows, when the dungeon master’s wife comes downstairs and says, rather harshly, “I don’t mean to be a bitch, but I’ve got a sleeping child upstairs.”
The game breaks up. As everyone gets ready to go, John is teased by the others, and then he hears DM Jack’s wife and another player, Nancy, talking about him: “I heard that he killed his younger brother. Yeah, it was on the news here for weeks. And his father went splitsville after that. And his mother, she’s a religious nut. Quite the freak.”
“Like mother, like son, huh?” says Nancy.
Later, John and DM Jack talk, and it becomes clear John is in love with Brooke, whose character is Jahandra, even though in real life her boyfriend is Zac, a self-described burnout stoner. John leaves the DM’s house, and outside in the snow he finds a gold ring. (The ring is never mentioned again.)
After a scene with Brooke and Zac discussing what to do about John harassing her, and a scene with the two bullies, Hanee and Russell, waking up and getting ready for work after a night of drinking beer, the film returns to DM Jack’s basement and the next gaming session.
At the end of an exciting session, DM Jack hands out flyers for his Christmas party, with the theme of “The Demon Within.” Zac and Brooke separate, and John asks if she wants to get something to eat. She replies insensitively, “Yeah, I would, but not with you. No thanks.”
Outside, Zac and Brooke have a fight, so John tries speaking with Brooke again, though it’s clear he can’t separate her from her character. “Man, you are on psychotic individual,” she says, getting in her car and driving off.
A dejected, and possibly crazy, John drives home, listening to a slow, depressing grunge song. For unexplained reasons, a police car follows him. As John mumbles vows from the role playing game, he drives past a Dead End sign. He closes his eyes and drives into a tree; it is unclear whether this is intentional or not. The car bursts into flames and we hear John screaming.
The film cuts to DM Jack’s history class, where the principal arrives and brings him to the office, informing him that John died in a car accident. A detective found Jack’s party invitation in John’s car, so they ask questions about the gaming club Jack runs. Naturally, the principal and the police assume that gaming had something to do with John driving into a tree. DM Jack is suspended and escorted off school grounds.
At John’s funeral (to which, for unknown reasons, the bullies complain they had to drive three hours), his mother accuses DM Jack of having something to do with her son’s death. “You and that infernal game! You drove him to it! You sent the devil to take my little boy!”
As the film enters its second half, we follow the gamers against whom John had beefs. One of the bullies, Hanee, works for his father at his Christmas tree lot, where the father is upset that people buy artificial trees. “You can bet Jesus would never settle for a fake tree.”
“You got that right, Dad, since Christmas trees are like some ancient Germanic pagan symbol brought down from the Middle Ages or something.”
When Hanee goes into the rows of the tree farm to cut down some blue spruces, he is surprised to see a horse, and then a knight appears and kills him with a sword.
In an even more suspenseful scene (if such is possible), the other bully, Russell, is killed by the ghostly knight outside the convenience store where he works.
Meanwhile, DM Jack goes to his basement, where he finds a dungeon laid out exactly like his house. From this small display, he deduces that Jack, Jr. is in danger, but when they check on the little boy he is asleep.
The next day, Zac confronts DM Jack at the school, where Jack is retrieving his belongings. Speaking about Hanee and Russell, Jack tells Zac, “They’re dead.”
“What do you mean dead?” Zac asks dramatically. “I mean, I just talked to them the other day.”
“I mean dead. In pieces.”
“What do you mean, in pieces?”
“I mean they’re dead.”
Elsewhere, gamer Nancy is at her college computer lab when a friend tells her that Hanee and Russell are dead. Her friend says she should leave the gaming club but Nancy says, “It’s like a group getting together to play cards or Scrabble or Pictionary or something.”
The friend retorts wisely, “People don’t start dying after a heated game of Scrabble.”
Of course, Nancy is the next to be stalked by the ghostly night, who appears in the college corridors along with a cloud of fog. The knight moves toward her, but we don’t see him attack her. (Later we will hear she is alive, but we never see Nancy again.)
Back at DM Jack’s house, he and his wife watch TV news coverage of the murder spree. Perhaps satirically, the font used to spell out BRUTAL MURDER on the TV screen is comically whimsical.
The news coverage, of course, links role playing games with John’s suicide as well as the murders of the bullies.
The film cuts to a local bar, where Brooke works as a waitress. She tells the avuncular bartender, “If one more guy makes a lewd remark about where he wants to put the meat, I’m gonna kick him in the balls.”
“Don’t even joke about a thing like that. Us guys, that’s one of our favorite places, if not our favorite.”
“Yeah, well, most of these guys haven’t used their equipment in years, except for pissing beer through, I mean.”
“How can you tell?”
“Well, the more they talk about it, the less they actually get. It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch out for.”
When Brooke sees the TV report about her friends’ deaths, she leaves the bar. In the parking lot, someone follows her and grabs her, but it is not the knight. Instead, it is a would-be mugger/rapist. The knight suddenly appears on a horse and kills the attacker, spattering Brooke with blood and then riding off on his horse.
Later, local detectives investigate the crime scene. “We did find hoof prints over there in the mud, and they do appear to be those of a horse.”
Zac, meanwhile, visits DM Jack and his wife at their house. Upset, Zac believes John is back from the grave to kill the members of the gaming club because the game was his life. “John is still playing the game.”
DM Jack is skeptical. “What are you talking about? If we played Monopoly instead of Pandemonium, he’d be a boot going around kicking everybody in the ass?”
In order to be safe, Zac stays at Jack’s house overnight and the two take turns watching over the others. In the morning, little Jack, Jr. wheels a suitcase across the floor. He tells his parents, “I’m going with John” as they wake up.
Jack runs upstairs to find Zac murdered. He returns downstairs to see the ghostly knight and Jack, Jr. walking down a fog-shrouded hallway that leads to a magic portal.
Thinking quickly, DM Jack narrates the campaign as dungeon master (or lord of lore). “I declare this campaign over. You may cross over now into the Hall of Heroes, where you may eat and drink and sing song until ye be summoned to action once again. But your squire must undertake his own quest, until he proves himself.”
The gambit appears to work, as the knight turns to the portal, but Jack, Jr. refuses to answer to his name. Desperate, Jack tells him, “Your name is Jackson Kyle Nixon.”
The little boy’s voice is now deep and gruff as he says chillingly, “Not any more.”
The End
It must be noted that Knight Chills must have been inspired at least in part by the unfortunate suicide of James Dallas Egbert III and the subsequent fictional adaptation called Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters. I confess I do not know if the late Mr. Egbert's ghost murdered the others who played D&D with him (I do not even know if he really played D&D, as that aspect of the case was apparently exaggerated), but Knight Chills implies that it did happen, so I would not be surprised.
As do many classic films, Knight Chills raises many questions it does not answer. For example, did John really kill his little brother? Did he even have a little brother? This story thread is raised near the beginning but never resolved. What happened to Nancy and Brooke? Was the knight in fact John's ghost, or someone or something else? Perhaps these questions would have been addressed in a sequel. Unfortunately, no such sequel exists. The Michigan-set Knight Chills is the only directing credit for Katherine Hicks. Whether or not there were sequels, however, Ms. Hicks should be proud of her accomplishment, and for so deeply asking the important question: "Do role playing games lead to supernatural murder?" (Of course, in the real world, this question has a definitive answer -- no, of course not. But in the cinematic world, it is something that must be asked, and the answer might be something different.)