For the sake of pure disclosure, I’ve never seen the original television movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, mostly because it was a bit before my time. I did however watch some clips on YouTube before I sat down to write this review (mainly to see how different the creatures were in the 1970s). That being said, I walked into Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark with no preconceptions, except for the belief that it would be awesome since Guillermo del Toro was involved as both producer and writer. Boy was I wrong.
In the present day, troubled Sally (Bailee Madison) is sent to live with her father (Guy Pearce as the ambitious architect/real estate developer Alex) in Rhode Island to escape the pressures of big city life and living on the West Coast. Alex is working with his interior decorator/girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes delivering yet another cardboard performance) as they look to restore the Blackwood Estate in an effort to jump start their careers. Of course, Sally is uncomfortable with this arrangement, but goes along with it. At night, she hears voices coming through the vents, and even finds windows to an undiscovered basement while walking the grounds one day. The groundskeeper warns them that the basement is dangerous, but the voices Sally keeps hearing from the basement are too enticing, so she opens up the grate that leads to where the creatures are imprisoned.
From that point, the film turns into a typical horror movie where all rational thought goes out the window. There’s a scene where Sally is trapped in a bathtub and all the creatures are surrounding her. She gets out of the tub, runs to the door, and realizes it’s locked, but doesn’t turn the light back on which was right next to the door knob. As a horror fan, I know to expect these types of lapses, but they just felt too contrived here. The biggest problem I had though were all the missed opportunities. There were plenty of times where I expected something horrible to happen, but the filmmakers did nothing more than tease the audience without delivering the scare. Also, the stock characters were woefully inept and laughable when they reacted, especially the housekeeper and the aforementioned groundskeeper.
Bailee Madison in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Photo by Carolyn Johns
© Miramax Film Corp. All Rights Reserved.
Also, since del Toro was attached, I held out high expectations for the creatures, especially given his work with the Hellboy franchise and Pan’s Labyrinth. The creatures in this film felt a little too cartoonish, like they belonged more in a movie like Ghoulies or Critters than in something with del Toro’s name attached to it. The film did do a good job explaining the origin of these creatures and trying to make them the film’s stars. I just had a hard time taking them seriously, especially the way their voices were portrayed. At first it was properly creepy, but it just ended up unintentionally campy.
While I have painted a pretty grim picture of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, it does have a few things going for it. For one, the cinematography is stunning. They did a good job capturing the eerie and ominous feeling surrounding the estate. The music was also effective in assisting the camerawork, although by the end it started to feel too much like the score for a bad TV movie. In fact, now that I think of it, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark essentially felt like a bad TV movie of the week with a big screen budget, which makes sense since it was adapted from the same.
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