Not afraid of the Dark

When screenwriter Guillermo del Toro and director Troy Nixey began work on Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, they set out to make a PG-13 picture. After all, the film is a remake of a 1973 TV movie that, despite its lack of gore, made quite an impression on a young del Toro. The MPAA had other ideas, and ended up giving the film an R rating, because they found it “pervasively scary.” One might consider this a ringing endorsement of the summer’s latest horror venture, but the MPAA was, as expected, terribly wrong. Nixey’s directorial debut is undone by the simple fact that its CGI monsters belong in a comedy, not a supposed fright-fest.
The film is a classic haunted house story. A precocious young girl named Sally is sent to live with her architect father Alex (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes). Alex is absorbed with his work restoring an old mansion called Fallen Mill, angling for the cover of Architectural Digest magazine. (https://halcyonliving.co.uk/) Sally, played by Bailee Madison, is an unhappy little girl. Her mother has, in her words, given her daughter away, and Sally doesn’t care for her dad’s new house or his love interest. Her nascent abandonment complex is compounded when, to no one’s astonishment, the mansion turns out to be inhabited by little monsters that torment her and play on her feelings of being unwanted.
Visually, the movie’s gorgeous. The house and its environs are shot beautifully by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. Ornate rooms and gardens, soft lighting, and a tinkling score combine to give Fallen Mill a fairytale-like quality typical of del Toro projects. One of the movie’s most memorable shots is the mahogany foyer of the house bathed in warm light from a huge window above the double staircase—the place really could be in Architectural Digest. Madison’s acting stands out here, her blank expressions and chubby face playfully inviting comparison to Danny Torrance in The Shining.
This film has more of an old-school feel than most of the summer’s horror fare. The pacing is deliberate and suspenseful, and it shies away from what del Toro terms “torture porn.” But when the film reaches the “jump scenes,” the monsters are downright embarrassing. Their goofy hunched-over gaits and their high-pitched chants of “Sally!” elicited little more than an occasional laugh from the audience. The only genuine scare in the movie comes during the prologue, when we’re shown a previous owner of the house, and what the evil forces there have driven him to do. This would have been a better angle for the whole movie: relying on crazed characters rather than the monsters themselves to deliver the scares.
Should this movie even have been remade at all? Perhaps del Toro and Nixey should have listened to the advice of Mr. Harris, the wise groundskeeper who in the 1973 original cautions the doomed homeowners: “Some things are best left the way they are.”