2010’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a remake of a 70’s made-for-TV horror movie. As a big fan of that particular niche, I have seen the original film. It isn’t one of my favorite horror telefilms, but it is pretty solid. Kim Darby played a housewife who was trying to not be abducted by evil, tiny creatures that live in a basement which had been bricked up until she discovered it.
In this new version, it would appear a young girl (Bailee Madison) is the one in danger. Her father (Guy Pearce) has brought her from LA to Rhode Island to live in an old mansion he has been restoring with his latest flame (Katie Holmes). Madison strongly disapproves of Holmes and, without having any friends in her new home, she is all the more susceptible to the disembodied voices from the vents saying they want to be her friend. As a kid, that would have only scared the shit out of me, but maybe all her friends back in LA lived in her ventilation system.
The voices are strongest from within an ancient ashpit in the basement. The grill is bolted on and there are runes on the mantle over it, as if it predates western civilization. I guess Vikings did make it to North America, where they went inland a fair bit, poured a foundation for a basement, and made an enclosed ashpit.
Jack Thompson, as the keeper of the estate, had gone to great pains to ensure the house did not appear to have that basement. Once that cat is out of the bag, Pearce is driving a sledgehammer through the expensive hardwood paneling on the foyer wall to get to the door he believes is concealed behind it. I think it says something about his character that he so readily trashes a house he is hoping to get on the cover of Architecture Digest.
Even worse is how much he is ignoring Madison. Holmes, on the other hand, becomes increasingly concerned about his daughter. Something I find interesting is how much Madison looks like how Holmes might have looked at her age. We only ever hear a voice of the actress who is supposed to be the girl’s mother, but I found myself wondering what she looked like.
This remake was a passion project of Guillermo Del Toro. He doesn’t direct (instead producing and co-authoring the screenplay), but his fingerprints are still all over this. This is essentially a gothic film, even if set in the present, and so recalls Crimson Peak, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. And how Madison had discovered the basement was through exploring the expansive grounds, including a secret garden where pollen hangs in the air, making me think this area would be hell on my allergies. This is the kind of scene I believe Del Toro has contractually mandated in any film with which he is associated. The only other artist I would have thought might have been responsible for this is Peter Jackson, but that’s more so because the murderous little creatures here sound like a bunch of tiny Gollums.
The weakest aspect of the film is we see these things too frequently and too much of them each time we do. Ideally, we would see very only shadows or the smallest details. Keep in mind, these things are terrified by (possibly even harmed by) light, so we shouldn’t be seeing them much. This is the path the film takes initially. Unfortunately, we will soon see these horrible little things extensively, and they are the usual CGI rubbish. They look so similar to tiny monkeys that this is how I have come to regard them.
The little monkeys apparently eat teeth. In a pre-credit sequence, we see the original house owner in the 19th century leaving an offering for them of his teeth as well as those his housekeeper involuntarily donated. Madison will later find one of these teeth, and I couldn’t understand why those were still there over a hundred years later. Seems like a waste of food. She puts that under her pillow and, the next morning, a silver dollar has been left in its place. Apparently, that was an arrangement made a pope a long time ago. To summarize, a pope negotiated a truce with tiny monkeys that eat human teeth (when they aren’t exchanging them for silver dollars) and who live in an ashpit I suspect was built by early Viking settlers.
Perhaps the biggest surprise regarding Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is it isn’t PG-13. I do not recall any profanity, and there isn’t any sex or nudity, but the violence in it was strong enough to warrant an R. It received that rating despite not relishing the gore. I appreciate that approach and, in general, I found this to be a better movie than it seems to be generally regarded.
Dir: Troy Nixey
Starring: Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison
Watched on blu-ray