One of the great things about Wes Craven’s Scream was its pop-culture savvy. Its characters couldn’t make very easy marks if they’d seen every important horror movie ever made and, conversely, the psycho killer was an even more cunning villain because he’d seen all of those movies.
It was a smart film because Craven, his characters and his audience were on an even keel: They all lived in the now, they were all working with the same knowledge base and their only clichés were delivered or understood with self-conscious winks.
Guy Pearce’s dense, workaholic architect in the silly new trifle Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark couldn’t be less self-aware of the hackneyed horror film he inhabits. The movie’s audiences will always be 10 steps ahead of this lunkhead, who requires nothing short of a 2-by-4 to the memory bank to realize that the centuries-old gothic mansion he’s restoring might – gasp! – harbor some supernatural skeletons in its cavernous closets. He, and the film’s writers and director, are in deep need of some Clockwork Orange-like conditioning, set to a never-ending montage of clips from The Haunting, Rebecca, House and Pan’s Labyrinth, to name just a few.
If you’ve seen any of the film’s marketing, you’ll know that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is the product of the Pan’s Labyrinth auteur himself, Guillermo del Toro. He produced and co-wrote the screenplay – a quasi-retread of Pan’s about another girl running from her broken home toward the stuff of twisted fantasy – but his visionary directorial hand is sorely missed.
That dishonor is held by first-timer Troy Nixey, who couldn’t scare us with Alfred Hitchcock’s camera. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark feels like a lame watered-down remake of a better film shot somewhere else, because it bears all the trappings of conservative Hollywood horror cinema: cheap false alarms, telegraphed scares, opportune lightning strikes and the employment of spasmodic, confusing cinematography instead of actually showing us what’s happening. Unable to ratchet up anything resembling suspense, we’re left expecting every shock moment, and none of them satisfy.
Del Toro and Nixey must be hedging their bets on the human story at the core of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – hoping it will help viewers overlook the flaccid scare tactics. The subject is childhood displacement; for vague reasons, 8-year-old Sally (Bailee Madison) is carted away from her mother’s home in Los Angeles and promised a transient tenure with father Alex (Pearce) in the spooky mansion he’s hoping will rejuvenate his architectural career. Sally doesn’t take to Alex’s new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) or her relocation, and the film tries – unsuccessfully – to move us with Sally’s plight before easing us into the horror plot, some nonsense about a cabal of hunchbacked, rat-like creatures who live behind a grate in the boarded-up basement and feast, conveniently enough, on little girls.
Nixey needed to make us care about the characters to be invested in the horror plot, and in this regard, as with all other regards, he fails abysmally. He can’t seem to generate any lemonade out of his lemon of a cast. Pearce and Holmes are one-note performers – his is impatient frustration, hers is flustered brow-furrowing – who don’t register as anything but useful archetypes. Only Madison seems engaged by her character, treating her gradual entrapment by threats both foreign and domestic with genuine life-or-death terror.
Of all the simplistic stereotypes in this film – of all the clichés cribbed from the copious canon of haunted-house hysteria — the most laughable is that of the creepy, inquisitive groundskeeper who knows everything. He’s played by Jack Thompson and, by the time he’s sliced and diced by the recently unleashed pests, it dawned on me the exact movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark seems to be remaking: The Beyond, Lucio Fulci’s lousy 1981 grindhouse take on the exact same subject; both films even begin with a historical prologue suggesting the horror plot that will reemerge in present day.
At least Fulci’s unapologetic gorefest had the creative hook of setting the haunted abode over an entrance to Hell, a cool arrangement for the exhausted proceedings. All del Toro and Nixey can muster are a few skittering Gollum knock-offs who want to eat.
DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK. Cast: Guy Pearce, Katie Holmes, Bailee Madison, Jack Thompson, Julia Blake; Director: Troy Nixey; Distributor: Miramax; Rating: R; Opens: Friday in most area theaters.