Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.It was a school yard talking point for fright fans growing up in the early '70s: the American Broadcasting Corporation, looking for a prime time hook, came up with the now notorious ABC Movie of the Week. Within its many 90 minute delights were such future fixations as Kolchak, the Night Stalker, Killdozer, and the diminutive demon delights of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Starring Jim Hutton and Kim Darby, it remains today a potent bit of haunted house hokum. Longtime fan Guillermo Del Toro was so taken by the seminal scarefest that he decided to foster a remake. The new version of Don't, directed by protégé Troy Nixey, reimagines the narrative as a Grimm's fairy tale come to horrific life. While not always successful, it definitely delivers a nice amount of late Summer shivers. Poor little Sally (Bailee Madison). She's been shipped off to live with her high strung house flipping Dad (Guy Pearce) and his interior designer girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes). Currently in the middle of a massive renovation on the mansion of renowned naturalist painter Emerson Blackwood, the girl gets lost in the seemingly endless space. When she stumbles upon a hidden basement, she hears voices calling her name. Later, something unnatural and malevolent starts haunting her, wanting to "play" while constantly threatening her safety...and sanity. It turns out that Blackwood Manor is home to a group of evil fairies who want Sally all for themselves and no one or nothing will stop them from achieving their wicked aims.
As any fan of the original will tell you, the best element of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is the idea of tiny monsters making life miserable for a vulnerable victim, and thankfully, the update retains such an approach. Yes, it magnifies the mythology - sometimes, unnecessarily so - and spends a bit too much time on Sally's simmering abandonment issues, but overall, the tone is terrifying and the suspense palpable. Like his own films, producer and co-writer del Toro infuses a sense of wicked whimsy into the mix. When it works - as in the brilliant Juan Antonio Bayona effort The Orphanage - we don't mind the added macabre enchantment. But there are times in this film when we wish the backstory was scaled down to make room for more horror. We've come to be shocked, not read a bloated bedtime story.
Still, Nixey does a nice job of mixing the implausibility of the situation (a man renovating a house who doesn't know an entire basement exists under his feet? Huh?) with the true terror of a child. Ms. Madison does a great job, accentuating her victim's role with a nice mixture of brazen brattiness. It makes Sally a hard hero to fully embrace, even as the CG imps go gonzo on her psyche. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is relatively robotic, going through the motions without adding much to the proceedings. This leave the ending, revolving around the themes of love and sacrifice, a bit flat. On the other hand, the creatures provide a nice old fashioned level of menace, something lacking in today's blood and gore takes on the genre.
Oddly enough, as the final scenes unfold, we wish that Don't Be Afraid of the Dark was somehow bigger, somehow bolder. Unlike the masterful Insidious, which set-up its situations and then launched into full blown fright freakout mode, this TV movie update wants to be both subtle and scary. It's a weird, often wonky combination that trips up as often as it triumphs. Forty years ago, tiny TV budgets and massive imagination created one the medium's most memorable horror experiences. As with most updates, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is reverent, respectful...and relatively unnecessary.
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