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Arts & Entertainment

Spook Meter Low for 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark'

Guillermo del Toro's visual oversaturation in horror remake takes away from the suspense.

What scares us at a very young age tends to fester in our subconsciousness well into our adulthood. For 9-year-old Guillermo del Toro, no film was more nightmare-inducing than John Newland’s 1973 TV movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

That film starred Kim Darby (aka Mattie Ross in 1969’s True Grit) as a woman terrorized by malicious goblins inhabiting the mansion she inherited from her grandmother.

The picture was in the classic tradition of haunted house thrillers that exploit audiences’ fear of unknown noises emanating from shadowy corners of a seemingly empty room. Seen today, the dated makeup and prosthetics look like they belong in a Twilight Zone episode, but it’s clear why this film left such a lasting impression on del Toro and countless other members of his generation.

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The original has a sort of transcendently creepy material that begs to be remade, but del Toro is unfortunately the wrong man for the job. 

Anyone familiar with del Toro’s work is well aware of his strengths as a visual stylist and a master of cinematic fantasy. His masterpiece is 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, an exhilarating work of visionary filmmaking that functioned as both a fractured fairytale and a brutal war-torn period piece.

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Only Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson equals del Toro’s gift for special effects, though both men falter when they tackle material that doesn’t call for visual oversaturation. In many ways, producer and co-writer del Toro’s Dark remake is as much of a folly as Jackson’s botched adaptation of The Lovely Bones

The boundless invention of del Toro’s instantly recognizable character designs greatly enhance a creature feature like Hellboy, but his lack of restraint is the wrong approach for a thriller that’s meant to play on the mind. Once the camera lingers for longer than a flash-frame on the mediocre computer-animated goblins, the scares instantly vanish.

As Super 8 proved earlier this summer, audiences are so familiar with the movement of digital images that they have lost their power to truly spook. While Labyrinth masterfully melded in-camera effects with animation, Dark merely offers a squadron of demonic weasels more cartoonish than the chimps in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

First-time feature director and veteran comic book artist Troy Nixey sticks to the expected assemblage of genre tropes without making any attempt to put his own distinctive stamp on them. We’ve all seen the moving bookshelves, the hollow walls that lead to forbidden corridors and the less-than-cuddly toys that elicit a recorded squeal of “I Love You” that isn’t loving in the least.

What’s surprising is how inept the filmmakers are at even getting this by-the-book formula right. The script by del Toro and his Mimic writing partner, Matthew Robbins, is riddled with plot holes that may not have mattered as much if the film weren’t lacking in other areas of interest.

Perhaps del Toro’s one decent contribution to the story was transforming the heroine from an adult woman to a 9-year-old girl (played by Bailee Madison) visiting her father (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) at the mansion they’ve been aiming to restore. Madison is a wonderful young actress best known for her remarkable emoting in Jim Sheridan’s equally unnecessary remake of Brothers, and her performance is the sole bright spot in Dark.

There are several moments in which cinematographer Oliver Stapleton’s elegant lens pauses for long periods of time on Madison’s face as she projects complex mixtures of resentment, awe, sadness and unbridled fear. Her work is so strong that one wishes the effects artists conjured monsters worthy of her reaction shots.

Too bad the same can’t be said for her lackluster co-stars. Holmes does what she can with a thoroughly thankless role, but Pearce makes his lame character even worse. He phones it in to the degree that he starts to appear sinister. Literally nothing phases this guy--not the disappearance of his daughter, nor the mysterious “accident” that left his groundskeeper hospitalized. It’s the sort of “accident” that could’ve only occurred if the groundskeeper had slipped headfirst into a swimming pool filled with screwdrivers. 

Why aren’t any of the characters more troubled by this? That’s one of many questions skeptical viewers will instantly find themselves asking. Why, for example, would Madison show a blurred picture she allegedly took of a goblin to her father as evidence of their existence rather than direct him to the corpse of the one she squashed with the bookshelf? Why wouldn’t Madison tear off the covers on her bed if she sensed that something had burrowed itself in between the sheets? Why would she grab a flashlight and crawl deeper into the sheets to see what’s lurking there?

Yet the biggest question of all is why del Toro would settle for an R-rating rather than fight for a more mainstream-friendly PG-13. Adults are guaranteed to find Dark far too childish to satisfy their thirst for suspense, so why not open the film to an audience of potential 9-year-olds who might find this stuff legitimately freaky?

With the exception of a couple tame but gratuitous gore effects, Dark could’ve easily been targeted at preteens. All that’s left for older viewers to appreciate are loud clangs on the soundtrack that elicit a wince that resonates for mere milliseconds.  

Moviegoers presently seeking pre-Halloween chills are advised to rent James Wan’s Insidious, which was released in April by FilmDistrict (the same studio behind Dark) and succeeded in creating an indelibly haunting atmosphere. Equally effective is Juan Antonio Bayona’s 2007 ghost yarn, The Orphanage, which del Toro also produced. Both films stand as timeless examples of psychological shockers that impeccably balance effects with superbly paced and textured storytelling.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is merely Drag Me to Hell without the laughs. What fun is that?

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark opened Aug. 26 at the AMC Showplace Village Crossing 18 and Regal Gardens 1-6 in Skokie. It opened at No. 3 behind The Help and Columbiana, earning $8.7 million in weekend ticket sales, according to Box Office Mojo.

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