'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark' Movie Review

Feeling rejected by her mother and distraught at the prospect of her father remarrying, Sally is reticent and standoffish, especially towards Kim. She finds some solace in exploring the mansion grounds, where she discovers a basement that had been sealed off from the house. Inside is a furnace that appears to have been bolted shut for years, but when she hears tiny whispered voices asking her to open it up and set them free, she loosens the bolts as best she can.

After she goes back upstairs, the rat-sized gnome-ish creatures, who use the furnace as a portal to their realm, finish the job and escape from the hole. After they destroy several items around the house, it becomes clear to Sally that these aren't exactly happy-go-lucky Smurfs. The photosensitive creatures torment the child, who struggles to convince the adults of their existence. But as more and more strange events occur, Kim does some research on the mansion's previous owner and starts to believe that something supernatural is happening. Can they escape the house, though, before the things that go bump in the night succeed in snatching Sally and bringing her down into their world?

Unless you find a chorus of whispers terrifying (and some of you very well might), the scares in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark are limited, in large part to the fact that the creatures themselves aren't particularly scary. They're basically rats with opposable thumbs, and their only power seems to be an unspecified ability to sort-of-but-not-really control minds through the power of suggestion. They can be squashed or tossed around like any average rodent, and they don't seem interested in anything truly horrifying, like gnawing on your flesh.

I say "seem" because the story is frustratingly vague, due in part to the shortcomings of the original script and in part to modifications made for the remake. The monsters' backstory and motivation are muddied by the additional characters (in the original it was just Sally -- an adult woman -- and Alex, her husband) and a mythology that involves the creatures craving...children's teeth? Do they target Sally because they want her teeth? Do they want to kill her? If so, why do they wait so long? And what is the handyman's role in all this? To further aggravate matters, Sally plays helpless horror victim for much of the film, not telling her dad about the creatures, not yelling for help immediately when the lights go out (which they always do) and obliviously reaching under beds and sticking her head into dark enclosed spaces.

The fact that the script is a weak spot is surprising, given the body of work of del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, The Devil's Backbone) and co-writer Matthew Robbins, with whom del Toro worked on Mimic and who has written well-regarded efforts like Dragonslayer, *batteries not included, Warning Sign and The Sugarland Express. The writing isn't all bad, of course; there are some serviceable child-in-peril thrills, a couple of splashes of humor and a final showdown that trumps the original.

Making his feature film directorial debut, comic book artist Troy Nixey delivers an attractive film that takes advantage of the shadowy mansion and plays more effectively with the concept of fearing darkness than the original movie did. Madison makes for an empathetic lead, and Holmes is solid, but Pearce is surprisingly stiff -- granted, that might be due more to the nature of his character than anything else. The CGI creature effects are strong but hidden in shadows for most of the movie -- and when they are shown, the little rugrats are so small, their design barely registers. Gore-wise, there's so little blood, you have to wonder how in the world this movie got an R rating. Supposedly it's for "violence and terror," but with no graphic violence and scares based on you-had-to-be-there childhood recollections, it's a PG-13 flick dressed in R-rated clothes. Still, for light, non-nightmare-inducing horror, it provides moderate, well-paced entertainment value.