Don't be Afraid of This Film

This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

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18 September

This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

* Contains spoilers *

I gather that Guillermo del Toro liked the t.v. story from which Don’t be Afraid of the Dark was adapted. It was perfectly understandable, in view of what appears to interest him, that it attracted him, but he may not have stopped to ask himself whether it would please anyone else.

For, given that he co-wrote the script, and that Pan’s Labyrinth holds together in a way that, for me, this simply did not, I have to ask why there were so many flaws, and why, with such a poorly conceived script, the film was made at all. (There may have been flaws in the original, but that was no reason to recreate them.) It is probably enough just to list some, in no particular order:

· Unless invoking magic, a Polaroid® camera that very obviously has five singe-use flash-bulbs cannot keep taking flash photographs indefinitely (for no reason, we had a shot of a collection of cameras earlier on);

· The extensive injuries inflicted on Mr Harris could not have been construed as resulting from any accident – no one, for example, could get a puncture wound (from the screw-driver) in the back of his leg at the same time as multiple lacerations to face and hands, and it is utterly implausible that the extent of the injuries and their causes would have been missed, at the scene or in hospital (end of residence, end of film);

· Accepted that it is a given of this sort of film (whatever it may be) that people just act stupidly (and despite the attempt at a sinister twist at the end), it made no sense for Kim (Katie Holmes) to go to the library after seeing Harris, rather than rescuing Sally (Bailee Madison) first;

· Creatures that can move objects without touching them (Mr Harris again, e.g. the Stanley® knife) do not need the agency of those objects to turn off light-switches, etc.;

· Sally may have been shocked (but what by? by people bursting into the library, who, as ever, seem to take a quiet eternity to do so?), but why did she show her father a photograph, not the creature that she had not been too shocked to manage to squash?;

· And what suddenly persuades him to believe her, when nothing else has happened? I did not recall the trade name, but (at her tender age – the States and child medication again!) she is probably taking an anti-depressant, and so has to be disbelieved!


Trying to set aside questions of genre, making sudden loud noises does not constitute horror (or suspense), e.g. the gratuitous thump in the soundtrack when Mr Harris apprehends Sally when she first discovers the basement window. Later, when the pace of the attack has stepped up (as, of course, it could have done at any point), there is just overloading of the senses, achieved by pounding music, other chaotic loud sounds, and confused visual displays that are typical of any so-called action film, but which, if it is one's intention, do not make one afraid, but raise anxiety.

We suspect that no one will make it out alive - anyone doing so is a bonus (but the adults have behaved so foolishly when they had the chance before). As to what the ending moments suggest about Kim, who actually cares?

True, it did seem, at one point (when she has been tripped on the stairs: these clever rhesus-monkey-like creatures, knowing how to tension wire - not there later, when Sally comes down - and which way down the stairs she'd come), that Kim was suggesting Sally as their kill instead of her (and, yawn, there may be earlier ambiguities).

Yet she does rescue Sally, she may or may not be dead (or transformed), and, if she isn't dead, who was the creatures' required victim?

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