Don't Be Afraid of the Dark MOVIE REVIEW

First off let me tell you about my theater experience.  During the beginning ads I knew there would be trouble; to the left side we could hear the shouting and explosions from some other movie.  There was no open door or anything, yet we could hear it perfectly.  So I went down to the concessions, saw a manager, and told him my dilemma.  He said he would turn the other one down and turn ours up, but still, especially during the quiet scenes, we could hear booming explosions from the other side of the wall.  I don’t know if this could have altered my opinion of the movie – I doubt it, but thought I’d mention it anyway.

As nearly every trailer and TV spot will tell you, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is produced and written by Guillermo del Toro, who in my opinion is one of the coolest people currently working in the sci-fi/horror genre right now.  This movie is based off of a 1973 made-for-TV feature; I have yet to see the original so I won’t be able to compare the two films.  In this version, Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce are a couple moving into a rickety old fixer-upper mansion; Pearce’s ~5 year old daughter comes to live with him after her mother “gives” her to him.  Unfortunately for her, there are creatures living in the basement of this mansion that want to eat children, and what follows is nothing new, pretty standard atmospheric horror.

The beginning of the movie starts off really well.  The opening scene that sets up what the creatures are is very spooky and quickly lets us know exactly what the creatures are after while also being entertaining.  But following the set-up and an eye-catching opening credits sequence, the movie trips over cliché after cliché, many of which audiences have outgrown since the 80’s and 90’s. The girl is the first to discover the monsters (as it often goes in these movies), and the lengths to which the adults don’t believe her are ludicrous.  In certain scenes, there is crystal clear evidence that the creatures exist right on the floor near them, but they continually dismiss that any of the fantasy elements could be real.  Also, things that we already know are explained to us in full only to drag the pace down.  In one scene, the Katie Holmes’ character goes to some library type place to “investigate” what the creatures are; there just happens to be a guy there that not only knows where everything about the creatures are located, but he seems to be an expert himself.  He appears for this scene only and to me represents poor writing/lack of imagination.

Besides the script though, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark has a lot of things going for it.  As I said, the atmosphere is pretty good, and the cinematography is great, with a lot of movement through the house and the outside gardens with few edits (at least fewer than most recent films of this type).  The creatures themselves are kind of cool also.  While they may not have been as threatening as they could have (they’re about the same level of danger as the critters in Gremlins), I thought they were at least unique.  I don’t want to ruin anything, but what the creatures are is a sort of alternate take on a popular myth, and I thought the way they handled that was interesting.  I do wish the idea of darkness was exploited a little better though; the idea with these creatures is that they don’t like the light – but at the same time we have to see the movie so it’s that kind of fake “movie darkness” that isn’t suspenseful (the little girl is walking around as if it’s really hard to see but everything is crystal clear on the screen).  If the movie used the darkness to shroud the creatures more, it would have been a lot scarier (that’s the golden rule in horror, just look at Jaws) and more believable.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is your standard horror movie.  Even though it has a lot of pitfalls and clichés, it’s still scary and entertaining: what else could you want from a movie like this?  With decent acting, a creepy mansion with amazing set design, a unique monster, and a few jump scares thrown in, it’s a legitimate time at the movies.  Just hope that if you’re in a crappy theater it’s not playing next to a Michael Bay film.

Rating: B-