Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Dont Be Afraid of Dark
Rating: 
Movie: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)
Studio : Miramax
Info : Click Here
Runtime : 99 min
Website : dontbeafraidofthedark.com
Rating : R
Trailer : 
Review:
Sally (Bailee Madison) is a young girl, who was sent to her father Alex (Guy Pearce) when she didn’t want her anymore. But Alex has a new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) that isn’t fond of the idea of suddenly being saddled with a child. But Kim has little choice and the family settles back down in a gothic mansion that Alex is remodeling. But Blackwood Manor has a horrific past and when Sally goes exploring, she finds that they are not alone. That there are voices coming up through the vent, voices that try to convince her that they are friends and they need to be let out of their prison. The moppet tries to tell her father, but he’s too busy in his work to pay any attention and Kim doesn’t believe her. And so she finds comfort from the isolation in these odd whispers that come from below, so much comfort that she lets them out, bringing horrible results to the family.
I can see why this got some bad press by a more contemporary audience that is used to movies like Friday the 13th and Saw, where horror is defined by the number of shock moments and horrible bloody messes with chainsaws and axes. But back in my day, the genre also included suspense. Alfred Hitchcock never showed the blood of the woman Norman Bates chopped up in the shower in Psycho, but we knew it was there. Suspense was something that was built up, starting as an uneasy feeling and getting progressively more eerie as it went along. And that is what this and its predecessor, the 1973 classic by the same name did. It provided less gore and less gotcha moments, but a slow building that made one sufficiently unsettled by the end.
A lot of that buildup had to do with the house itself, the set design created the mood for the film. It starts off in the initial scene that earned the movie its R rating, of Edward Blackwood a hundred years earlier, trying to extract the teeth of his maid in the most painful way possible. Every detail of the house from it’s interior to his drawings, to the art on the walls, everything screamed gothic and creepy. The house reeked of the horrible things that had happened there in the past, and even when the remodeling began, the lighting kept the tone of the dark spirits that inhabited the dwelling.
Sally represents the little kid in all of us, who slept with the light on after seeing our first horror film, who wondered if there were things under the bed or in the closet, who visited haunted houses on Halloween and screamed in terror. And newcomer Bailee Madison did well playing both the jilted child scorned by her parents and her father’s girlfriend and the scared little girl who just wants to leave this horrid place. And I think Madison should have a bright future ahead of her in films.
Guy Pearce was equally as good, even if we hated his character, at playing the father who is too busy to care what his daughter is doing or scared of. Katie Holmes is just so so as the girlfriend turned mother. As her character progressed, I actually found her more annoying and flat than when she started out as the hesitant mom.
There were two parts of the film though that drags down the score. The first was the creatures. The CGI goblins that looked a bit like a cross between Quasimodo and the dog from Taco Bell were not suspenseful, but a bit funny at places where they shouldn’t have been. The big reveal seemed to get more guffaws than it did frights. Del Toro would have done better keeping them in the dark and not be so open about what they were doing. That would have certainly added to the creepiness.
The other problem was the insane way that some of the characters dealt with the horror that surrounded them, which is a staple of horror films I know, but this one could have rose above that. I mean if you had these creepy things in your house, wouldn’t you leave or at least call an exterminator or something? It wasn’t like the house was keeping them there as in Amityville Horror.
Still even despite these two things, we still found the film a fun way to spend an afternoon and the movie will appeal to the ones who like their horror less on the Saw side and more on the Psycho side. And so we give it a 3.8/5. Newer and more jaded audiences might not get it, but those that can relate to Sally as a mirror of their own childhood should enjoy it.
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