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Darkness
Falls |
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| Some place names seem designed to indicate trouble
ahead. Can it be just coincidence, for example, that the town of Darkness
Falls is haunted by the vindictive, light-fearing ghost of an old woman
who was mistakenly lynched by townsfolk one hundred and fifty years ago?
Thriving only in shadow, her spectre steals children's last baby teeth from
under their pillows, and kills the little ones if they even peek at her
masked face. Kyle Walsh, who survived an attack of the so-called 'Tooth
Fairy' as a teen, returns to Darkness Falls twelve years later to help Michael,
his old flame Caitlin's young son, who is being menaced by a female figure
in the dark.
'Darkness Falls' begins with a cheesy voice-over which is so thorough in its exposition that you are left feeling its content must be a red herring (it isn't) or else that the rest of the film will be redundant (it is). From then on, there are no scares, no surprises, no tension, just a very average computer generated bogey-woman, a high body count of people we couldn't care less about, and a by-the-book build-up to Kyle's final confrontation with the unresolved nightmare from his childhood. While a film's image is constructed from light particles projected on a blank screen, our own imagination, when properly stimulated, will always prove to be far scarier than anything fully realised on the big screen. This is why light's absence is such a staple of the horror genre, where viewers are forced to supplement what remains unseen with the images playing in the darkened recesses of their own subconscious. In 'Darkness Falls', the photophobia of the Tooth Fairy gives rise to all manner of ill-lit set-pieces involving powercuts, failing torches and rundown old lighthouses - and there is even a five-second sequence of total darkness (a remarkably rare thing in cinema). Yet, whether through a lapse in judgement or just a lack of nerve, director Jonathan Liebesman completely undermines this effect by revealing fully the Toothfairy's appearance very early in the film, and then constantly reminding us of it. For a wraith who inhabits only the dark, this lady sure gets out a lot. There is some small satisfaction to be found in the rapidity with which pretty much every character with a speaking line in this film gets killed, but this will in the end only add to your sense of indignation that over-cute Macaulay-Culkin-lookalike Michael (played by Lee Cormie) somehow manages to survive. And the final, post-climactic pay-off is as futile as it is disappointing. Someone should tell Jonathan Liebesman that fans of horror tend not to like their endings too upbeat! If you really want to see the daddy of all kids-grown-up-but-still-scared-of-the-dark horror films, and if you like your horror to be scary, then check out 'They' - 'Darkness Falls', on the other hand, is doomed to be just a poor cousin. Oh, and if my views on 'Darkness Falls' sound a bit bilious, it is no doubt because I lived for a year in a place called Spit Junction... Anton Bitel, 12.05.03 |
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