Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

Have you noticed just how tight-lipped the trailers for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark have been? In fact, if you haven’t seen the 1973 television movie that inspired producer Guillermo del Toro’s remake, you might not have any inkling what this movie is about. Allow me to let you in on the secret.

The film opens with a Victorian-era prologue. The master of a sprawling gothic mansion lures a pretty chambermaid into his basement workroom, where he pounces on her and uses a hammer and chisel to extract everyone of her pearly whites. His ghoulish grin reveals he’s already done the same to himself. What’s even more unsettling is that the two sets of chompers are meant to be an offering to an unseen, whispering army of creatures, who are not so easily satisfied. Their response to the gift: “We want child’s teeth.”

That’s our first clue that this is no place for young Sally (Bailee Madison) to be sloshing around in her Wellies. Nonetheless, her off-screen mom has sent the little girl to live with her father, Alex (Guy Pearce) and his younger girlfriend, Kim (Katie Holmes) in the creepy old house. No sooner does Sally unpack her pink overnighter than the little tooth lovers begin whispering her name.

Dad is so distracted with restoring the place and getting onto the cover of Architectural Digest, though, that he doesn’t notice his daughter’s moody curiosity morphing into abject terror. It’s Kim that begins to uncover the evil that lives in the house and threatens their already unstable family unit.

As with many horror films, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark isn’t really concerned with what it purports to be about. Sure, director Troy Nixey shows us the sinister creatures–too early and often, I might add–that threaten young Sally and plucky Kim. And yes, the computer-generated little guys are a genuinely scary mix of one part Dobby, the house elf, and two parts lemur with shark teeth. But they’re not the bad guys at the heart of this story. Not really.

Unfortunately, it’s clear from del Toro’s script (written with Matthew Robbins) that he thinks they are. But he’s missed the point–one which the trailers are savvy enough to get at–entirely. Is evil haunting the house? Or is Sally, an abandoned little girl, the one who is haunted and going mad for lack of love? Is there a parallel between the house’s original owner, who goes crazy from losing his child, and Alex, who doesn’t seem to want his around? The script makes the answer to all of these questions too clear, too soon and suffers for it.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark would have been a much more intriguing film had there been more…intrigue in it. It’s the key ingredient in the handful of scenes that jolt the audience to attention. In one, Sally slowly crawls under her covers with a flashlight on her way to the foot of the bed to confront the monster face-to-face for the first time. It takes what feels like ages. It’s terrific and terrifying pacing that works exactly as it should. Instead of continuing like this, Nixey gives us interminable scenes of the CG critters running around the house, not scaring anyone at all.

For her part, eleven-year-old Bailee Madison manages to imbue Sally with moodiness, without being bratty, so that you actually care whether she lives or dies. The same can’t be said of Pearce or Holmes. I ordinarily enjoy both performers (seriously, see Holmes in The Gift. She’s pretty good.), but here Pearce looks bored and Holmes appears scared from the get-go. Neither sets the right tone or builds the necessary mystery to sustain the film.

Ultimately, the trailers for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark have a better grip on horror than the film itself. Sometimes it’s not what you know. It’s what you don’t.