DARKNESS FALLS

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Tuesday, January 28, 2003

DARKNESS FALLS sets up the back story for its mythology with a voiceover that tells us all about it. While a prologue set in the mid-1800s might have been a little pricey, starting a horror movie off with a mouthful of verbiage tends to give the audience qualms. In any event, we learn that kindly old Darkness Falls resident Matilda Dixon, once renowned for giving the local children money in exchange for lost baby teeth, became a recluse behind a mask when her face was disfigured in a fire. Then, wrongly blamed for the disappearance of two youngsters (who subsequently showed up just fine), Matilda was hanged, laying a curse upon her tormentors.

For the 150 years after Matilda's death, Darkness Falls has developed an unusual legend the Tooth Fairy, aka Matilda's ghost, visits children on the night they loose their last baby tooth, and should they happen to spy their visitor, she'll kill them, although she can be banished by light. At age 10, Kyle catches sight of the Tooth Fairy he manages to elude her, but the ghost kills Kyle's mother. Twelve years later, Kyle (Chaney Kley) is something of a nervous wreck living in Las Vegas (a town where the lights never go out good touch), when childhood sweetheart Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) phones out of the blue. It seems her little brother Michael (Lee Cormie) is having "night terrors." Caitlin remembers that Kyle suffered from a similar fear of the dark and wants to know what he did to get over it. Kyle, of course, isn't over it at all, but as he's the only one who knows the little boy is in real danger, he reluctantly heads back to the source of his greatest fears.

Director Jonathan Liebesman

works up some good scary sequences, especially the prolonged childhood attack on Kyle at the beginning of the film. Thereafter, though, we get so bogged down in questions about what's happening and why that it's hard to be particularly frightened in the moment. If this has been going on for 150 years, why don't kids who lose their teeth just sleep with the lights on? (Liebesman and the writers set us very much in the real world, so dreamlike despair is not an explanation.) If the ghost goes after kids, why does it arbitrarily show itself to and then attack various adults (something that might seem less egregious if it wasn't explained that an entire bunch of folks stuck in the dark are safe)? Why is the ghost suddenly rampaging? Why doesn't it grab Kyle, the one who got away, at the first opportunity? It's possible that some version of the screenplay credited to John Fasano and James Vanderbilt and Joe Harris, from Harris' story, addressed all of this much more comprehensively, but what's onscreen leaves too much time to ponder all of this without satisfying answers.

Kley is an affable leading man type who is likable enough, and Caulfield (Anya from BUFFY) is personable and sincere, keeping the reins tight on Caitlin's acute distress. The makeup effects by Stan Winston are appropriately gruesome and the fluttering, tentacle-like rags of the ghost's cloak make for some nice creepy imagery.

DARKNESS FALLS is diverting in a monster-in-the-dark way, but it trips over its storytelling, giving us at once too much and too little in the way of explanation.

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