On the outside it appeared Don’t be Afraid of the Dark was going to be one of those “chill you to the bone” kind of thrillers that doesn’t need to rely on jump scares to keep the tension high, but rather the story itself is creepy enough to keep you on edge. Unfortunately, director Troy Nixey’s attempts at atmospheric tension falls flat as he relies too heavily on traditional horror movie scares and the always-dark setting of a Gothic mansion as if we’ve never seen a haunted house before. I don’t know about you, but the creepier some places look, the less likely I am to believe anyone would hang out there, let alone the idea of a small child talking to whatever creatures may be whispering her name from the black hole in the basement
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t eternally disappointed in this film as the “produced by Guillermo del Toro” and R-rating were early signs this could be a top notch thriller. Instead it’s nothing more than just another run-of-the-mill haunted house-style movie, with creepy CG basement critters that look a lot like one-foot tall mutant monkeys. Sure, the opening scene is a bit of a chiller as some rather amateur dental procedures are undertaken, but when the best you have to offer involves characters we will never see again after the film’s opening five minutes you really haven’t accomplished much.
The setting for Don’t be Afraid of the Dark is Blackwood Manor, a dark, sprawling and overgrown estate where architect Alex Hurst (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) aim to restore the place and turn it over for a pretty penny. Coming to stay with Alex while the work is being done is his young daughter Sally (Bailee Madison) who’s been handed off by her mother and comes second to her workaholic father. Detached and looking for anything to show her some attention, Sally is drawn to whispers from the basement where an old furnace has been bolted shut following the events that kick off the film.
These little deviants are afraid of the light (or it hurts them, I couldn’t quite tell) and as luck would have it for any horror director, they do most of their evil deeds at night. Sally has removed the grate that locked them in their dungeon and now they want to take her down into the darkness with them.
The script, written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins (Mimic), is based on the 1973 telefilm of the same name. This new version adds the little girl to the story whereas the original only featured a married couple with the wife becoming the tormented member of the family. The child-in-danger addition is just one of the several examples from the film where we feel we are treading old territory, and it’s been done so much better in the past.
Then you get to the questions you’ll be asking yourself as you watch. Questions such as, Why didn’t she just turn on the bathroom light? What about the demon smashed in the bookcase? Why didn’t they look at all of the pictures? And this isn’t me nit-picking, these are general queries I would think any reasonable person would have while watching this film. A film is scarier when the audience is exploring the opportunities for escape and can’t logically find any. Here, the holes are gaping.
When a film forgets to answer the questions any reasonable audience member would ask, that audience member loses any sense of reality the film may have built and anything that may have been frightening about a scene just goes away. That is exactly how I felt while watching this movie.
As for the talent involved, Madison seemed to have issues creating a little girl that was neglected by her mother and ignored by her father. She came off as more of a princess than an ill-treated child. Pearce is equally unaffecting as he, at first, seems like a caring father, but as soon as his just-arrived daughter gives him the cold shoulder he pretty much passes on all fatherly duties.
This is where Katie Holmes comes in, the surprisingly best part of the film as she must balance the duties of the girlfriend Sally is uninterested in as well as show true signs of motherly care once she realizes the danger Sally is in. Holmes is convincing and it made me believe even further that del Toro and Robbins shouldn’t have abandoned the original teleplay and just centered the story on a married couple rather than a tormented young child. Then again, films about paranoid protagonists and the people that don’t believe them typically wear thin no matter who’s involved.
Don’t be Afraid of the Dark wasn’t an absolute bust, but it definitely was a major disappointment. The lack of scares and increasing frustration with the plot had me walking away shrugging my shoulders wishing things had turned out better.
