Cast: Chaney Kley, Emma Caufield, Andrew Bayly, Emily Browning

By Daniel Baig

“So, two-and-a-half stars, or three?” my editor asked me after I had given him my one sentence thumbs-up appraisal – “It’s actually pretty good for this sort of thing” – of the new horror flick "Darkness Falls."

“Oh, three, definitely. It does what it sets out to do” – which is to make its audience jump, frequently – “and does it well.”

The original title of the movie was "The Tooth Fairy." This was changed at some point, I suspect because the marketers were worried people, when they heard that name, would, even if only subconsciously, associate it with a TV movie of some years back in which Kirstie Alley played the Tooth Fairy. And that would be just setting themselves up for a negative comparison – because, really, what’s scarier than Kirstie Alley?

So now the pic takes its name from its setting, the fictitious little seaside (what sea exactly is not specified, though it’s fair to say it’s not the Tasman Sea, despite the fact that the movie was actually filmed on the Australian coast) of Darkness Falls. Yes, the town’s name is a verb phrase. Yes, I’m sure it’s not named after a local natural feature – there are no falls in Darkness Falls, and if there were, wouldn’t they be called “Dark Falls”? Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be a bad name for a horror film, either. What kind of people name a town Darkness Falls? I guess the same kind of people who’d name a town, oh, “Perdition”.

Actually, the kind of people who name a town Darkness Falls are movie producers, because it sounds cool. It lends itself to a catchphrase – “Darkness Falls. Evil rises.” Now, I was familiar with the fact that yeast rises. And the sun, too. But evil? Who knew?

Well, regardless of its oddness as the name of a place on a map, Darkness Falls is an appropriate name for the film, as it’s only in the dark that the malevolent spirit who plagues the town, the evil Tooth Fairy, is able to flit hither and thither doing deadly and gross (but off-camera – this is a PG-13 film –) things to people. And by dark, I don’t just mean night, although apparently that is a restriction as well; though a room in the daytime can be plenty dark, it’s only after sun-fall that she manifests herself. I guess she needs the daytime for her beauty sleep. Beauty sleep! Ha ha! That’s a joke, see. A long time ago when the Tooth Fairy was actually just an old lady who gave kids in the town money for their baby teeth, she got horribly burned. After that, she was u-u-u-GLY! And when she came back from the dead to get her revenge – oh, I’m not going to get into it now, the movie explains all you need to know in a very effective opening pre-title prologue sequence designed by Imaginary Forces, the outfit behind the famous titles of Seven, Mimic, and others, featuring photos and glass bubbling and cracking as flames devour them – she stayed ugly. So ugly that she steals a page from the Phantom of the Opera’s playbook and wears a porcelain mask all the time.

And since her burns make her all photo-sensitive (though, if she’s wearing the mask, I don’t see why exactly), any light, not just sunlight but good old electrical as well, has roughly the same effect on her as gay porn would on John Rocker.

Which means Darkness Falls is a variation of the same idea as in Pitch Black: light = safe, dark = dead.

And so the expected developments develop: will you be shocked when I tell you that at one point there’s a town-wide power failure (for no particular reason; no storm is in evidence)? No, you will not. Will you be shocked to discover that a character’s chances of survival to the end of the movie have a direct correlation to how high they appear in the credits? No, you will not. Will you roll your eyes when I tell you there is actually a jump scare courtesy of a cat suddenly leaping into the frame?? Yes, you will. (Amusingly, the filmmakers don’t even bother justifying the feline’s presence or giving it any context, like it’s lurking in the back of a garage or something; no, it just comes out of nowhere, and then heads back to that same place immediately after its task – to give the heroine, and us, a jolt – is accomplished.)

Will you also be entertained, despite all this, by this movie? If you enjoy nervous anticipation followed by the cinematic equivalent of a big BOO!, yes, you most certainly will.

You will enjoy it far more if you are able, as I was not, to completely shut off the analytical part of your mind which otherwise will nag you with annoying questions and distractions, like:

The Tooth Fairy takes her revenge on the town of Darkness Falls by killing children the night after their last baby tooth falls out (if they’re awake and see her, that is). At the start of the film, the boy who will grow up to be the story’s hero loses his. Which already is a bit odd, as he appears to be 12 years old. We also meet his young female friend. Then, after an amazingly good sequence, we flash forward 12 years. To stars Chaney Kley and Emma Caulfield. Who, while attractive people, look significantly older, I’m afraid, than 24. And who also, I might add, look absolutely nothing like their younger selves. (Though the young actor who plays boy Kyle, Joshua Anderson, is quite good, and really makes an impression.)

How is it that this Not-So-Good Fairy knows just who the leads are, and so always manages to snatch bit players first out of any grouping? (Star Trek red-shirt syndrome alert.)

Just some consistency in the way Matilda (that’s her old, pre-demonic name) operates would have been nice. Her definition of what’s dark and what’s light, and hence fair game or off-limits to her, seems to fluctuate rather wildly. Sometimes characters seem to be absolutely safe in the dark merely by holding a flashlight. Yet a little later somebody, not even actually in total darkness, holding a lit lantern, is plucked off by Her Ugliness. At one point a poor unfortunate meets her doom in the quarter of a second it takes her to dash through about three feet of gloom; later on, a little boy, with the old crone hovering directly nearby waiting to grab somebody, manages to make it up and down dark stairs, etc. without any harm befalling him. Sometimes you can outrun her, even in darkened hallways; at another instance, even gravity’s too slow a way to escape her clutches.

And how is that aforementioned little boy – played well by nine-year-old Lee Cormie, an actor I was surprised to discover is actually Australian, though perhaps I was too distracted by the fact that all his r’s are w’s (“It’s twue!!” he says) to notice he wasn’t American – knows the secret history of a character he’s just met, in addition to knowing all about the Tooth Fairy and her goals and limitations? He’s another preternaturally wise and/or psychic child, like in "The Ring" (or "The Sixth Sense," for that matter). He just knows.

Oh well. As I said before, you need to turn off certain parts of your brain, and go with the flow. I recommend "Darkness Falls" just for the masterfully done childhood sequence I mentioned above. It’s really quite terrifying. Credit goes to director Jonathan Liebesman, whose skill at shooting this kind of stuff belies the fact that this is actually his first feature, and the people who did the sound effects – the sound design was by Randy Thom of Skywalker Sound. You definitely want to see Darkness Falls in a theater with digital sound. For the first half of the movie or so, we don’t really get a good glimpse of Matilda. But we sure hear her, and that alone is pretty scary. The final shot of this opening sequence is just phenomenal, and worth the price of admission alone; the masterful framing, the lighting (the director of photography was Dan Laustsen, coming off of "The Brotherhood of the Wolf"), and above all, the shrieking sound, will stay with me.

I should point out that Liebesman and editors Steve Mirkovich and Tim Alverson cheat quite a bit in the first half with the action – the cuts are so quick we really have no idea what’s happening until there’s a body on the ground. And to be honest, I think that using frame-by-frame on a DVD copy would reveal a lot of shots of nothing much other than darker patches of darkness against lighter patches of darkness; this first part of the movie is all about the power of suggestion (which also conveniently helps with the budget). But when we do at last get to see Matilda, she’s quite impressive. Not a CGI effect at all, she was a large “puppet” designed by, and operated by a six-man crew from, Stan Winston Studios. And when she’s dropping straight down, her clothes billowing up behind her, it’s pretty darn cool.

Finally, I’d like to say I would have enjoyed Darkness Falls even more, I believe, and been significantly more scared by it, if the people directly behind me wouldn’t have talked LOUDLY throughout it, draining tension from scene after scene, despite the fact that they were repeatedly shushed and asked to be quiet by numerous critics. Who were these rude folks? Shockingly, one of the screenwriters and his friends and family. Scary behavior, during a scary movie.