24th October 2018 | 31 Days of “Alternative” Horror: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
The idea behind Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is more fun than it sounds: Depressed and anxious daughter, Sally, played by Bailee Madison, is sent away by her Mother, Joanne (the unseen Abbe Holmes, no relation to Katie) to live with her Father, Alex, played by Guy Pierce, and his new girlfriend, Kim, played by Katie Holmes. Sally resents her Father and clings to her mother’s phone calls for comfort. Sally’s reaction to Kim as the woman who took her Father away is less than cheery. Kim — the interior designer — and Alex — I believe is the architect — have bought a new sprawling mansion and are in the process of doing the place up.
No matter their work commitments, they decide Sally is a welcome addition to the house and Alex does his best to make Sally comfortable — although she rejects this, taking to remaining in isolation until they unearth a secret basement. In that basement, Sally begins to make new friends. She will spend the remainder of the movie trying to take Polaroids, avoid getting blamed for the critter’s havoc and try her hardest to convince anybody that these critters do exist. The movie provides a gentle balance of scares, but we are pulled in by the torment and thanks to a tight Del Toro screenplay, we never ever get bored.
The casting of Bailee Madison against Katie Holmes as a soon to be step daughter was in a way very distracting, and was in my eyes a casting misfire. The girl resembled Katie Holmes too much and could have been easily cast as her own daughter, right down to the eyes and the expressions. I soon got over it for the girl acted rings around the material, so maybe the misfire was with Holmes casting, not the daughter.
There was something of a symbolic motif of swirls that we were at first introduced to as a drawing by Sally. The second time we saw this was no more than five minutes later when she wiped the same swirl pattern on the steam of the car window. The spiral was never revisited, but it is a given that it was foreshadowing, not a setup for any payoff. Quite literally, her life was on a continuous spiral out of control… and it wasn’t about to stop…
Guillermo del Toro’s version was a remake of the ABC TV movie of the week (of the same name) released on October 10th 1973. Even though they attributed the creature design to other sources, there were a lot of similarities to the “people dressed in costumes” and “stop motion creatures” shown in the original. As a TV movie, it held up pretty well but for this list, lost out to the remake as a part of this selection — although I would not wish to dissuade you from seeking the original out. It may have lacked the colour and the visual richness in the remake, but it had a good stab at the many scares portrayed in the remake, and came out just as effective for the time.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark marked a bit of a side note: This is the first movie where actors Guy Pierce and Alan Dale have worked together since they played alongside each other as series regulars in the popular Australian soap Neighbours. I don’t know what’s spookier, seeing them together, or that I watched Neighbours as a teenager.
This movie is a fun break from all the darkness that Halloween has been building up to, especially for this list. It blends the “critters gone mad with switch blades” element of Gremlins and mixes it well with the classic haunted mansion movie.
Written by: Stephen Radford
website: stephenradford.com
Next:25th October: Julia’s Eyes
