I have several detailed problems with Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, the basic premise of which is so clichéd I hardly want to describe it. But here we go anyway. There's a big house and something bad happened in the house in the past. In the modern day, a nice couple (Alex and Kim, played by Guy Pierce and Katie Holmes) move into the house. Cue some horror hi-jinx. Whatever - we've all seen this before, but that in itself doesn't have to be a bad thing. Let's get stuck into why this is even rubbisher than it sounds:
Firstly, is this meant to be a film for kids? Because if it isn't then it's not scary at all, and if it is then it's got enough brutal violence in it to more than justify its 15 rating, therefore excluding its entire audience. The reason I suspect it's for kids is that for a supposed horror film there are very few deaths, and that the opening sequence feels like something out of Round the Twist. The 'big bad' is actually a bunch of rather silly-looking ratmen who come up from the floorboards and hide under your bed whispering noises into your ear. They have the feel of the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - hardly Evil Dead is it? But then it can't be for kids, because in the opening scene a man pins a woman to the ground and uses a chisel to smash her teeth out - killing her. Seriously. As such, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark falls between two genres and will end up satisfying no-one. The tone is all over the place. Simply put, it's not scary enough for horror fans but too gruesome for children.
The second point is the dismal foreshadowing of what happens to Kim and its Victorian overtones regarding attitudes to women. It's a classic setup, a mid-30s man's daughter (Sally) is moving in with him and his new girlfriend Kim, but Sally is struggling to accept this new woman in her father's life. In her innocent child-like way she describes her new surrogate mother as 'old', thus foreshadowing what must happen to all women in the eye of the silver screen as they age - which is to fade away and vanish. When it is stated that the ratmen have to 'take one life' before they return to the underworld the rest of the film is immediately plotted out and the DVD can be turned off safe in the knowledge that Kim must be sacrificed in favour of Sally's youth. I.e. mothers must willingly sacrifice themselves for their children. Older women are past it at the age of 35 and should give up their place in the world for younger women, who still have a chance to conceive. There's even a visual metaphor for the umbilical cord that separates Kim from Sally in the final scene, the mother must die so that the child can live. Please tell me if you think I'm reading too much into this, but the visual language of cinema tells stories just as much as the dialogue does, and I think it's extremely distasteful.
Finally, there are the PLOT HOLES. These mainly revolve around the way that the police don't seem capable of doing any sort of investigation, even when a man is horrible disfigured in a terrifying knife attack. Also there's the ineptitude of the ratmen. If all they need to do is kill Sally, eat her teeth and bugger off back into the netherworld then they have ample opportunities to get on with it. Instead they mince around in her room calling her name and appearing under her bedsheets along with discordant music in a dreary attempt at cattle-prod horror. The Nazis were frightening, this lot are too inept to be anything more than a mild annoyance.
Lastly - Katie Holmes isn't old. According to imdb she's a week younger than me, so leave her alone!
Save yourself 90 minutes - don't watch this.
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