Review: 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark'

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark takes all the dull, dreary clichés of the haunted house genre and polishes them until they shine as never before: the centuries-old mansion with a mysterious curse that's been placed upon it. The little girl whom the adults refuse to believe when she says that strange things are afoot. That scratching in the basement that you wish was only rats.

This movie plays like some kind of drunken mashup of The Innocents, Poltergeist, Pan's Labyrinth, and many, many more -- but it's in love with other horror movies, not condescending to them. The affection comes pouring off the screen and leaves you scared silly.

That Pan's Labyrinth comparison is key, because the movie is produced and co-written by that film's writer-director, Guillermo del Toro, who based the project on a 1973 television movie that starred Kim Darby and Jim Hutton. But even if the structure (a little girl unhappily sent to live with her father) and style (a journey into a mysterious forest leads to enchanted creatures) owes an obvious debt to Pan's Labyrinth, this film's director, Troy Nixey, gives the film a verve and wit all its own. If Pan's Labyrinth often felt too funereal, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark seems hellbent on showing you an ecstatic good time.

Meet Sally (Bailee Madison), a sullen young girl who steps off a plane from Los Angeles to greet her architect father, Alex (Guy Pearce), and his interior designer girlfriend, Kim (Katie Holmes). Sally's mother has sent her to live with them, without quite explaining the details to Sally, and now the little girl finds herself ensconced in a sprawling, half-renovated mansion in Rhode Island. Their work on the house, Alex and Kim hope, will land them on the cover of Architectural Digest and send their careers into overdrive.

A violent, Grand Guignol-style prologue notwithstanding, the first third of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark takes its sweet time revealing that something is deeply wrong with the place. Sally keeps hearing strange whisperings through the vents. Then one afternoon she wanders off and discovers a basement that neither Alex nor Kim knew existed. The cranky old groundskeeper Harris (Jack Thompson), who of course seems to know more than he's letting on, keeps shunting her away. But Sally can't resist loosening the bolts on the grate of an ash pit in the basement, literally allowing all hell to break loose.

One part menacing Gremlins, one part scampering sewer rats, the monsters that plague the house don't necessarily have the otherworldly majesty of del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth creatures. But Nixey, a comic book artist making his feature film debut, reveals them to us in quick, creepy glances, allowing the anxiety to steadily mount, and then he gleefully sends them scurrying through the house, underneath bedspreads and into closets. (With the help of cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, the director works particular wonders with sudden bursts of light flashed into pitch-black corners.) Nixey's sensibility sets him far apart from this generation's purveyors of horror, like Eli Roth (Hostel) and Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension), who twist the screws on their characters and offer little hope for salvation. Instead, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark recalls the bravura exuberance of Brian De Palma's Carrie and Steven Spielberg's Jaws, movies that held humor and horror in careful balance: You shriek in fear; you laugh at yourself for being so scared; and then you shriek all over again.

As the initially disbelieving, but later freaked-out parental figures, Pearce and Holmes give serviceable, if not especially memorable performances. The real star here is 11-year-old Madison. Her pale, cherubic face framed by dark brown bangs, her mouth slightly turned down, she looks carefully poised between indignation and wonderment -- which, when you think about it, is what childhood is all about.

Like the greatest scary fairy tales, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is ultimately about the most primal panic: that our parents aren't going to be there when we wake in the middle of the night; that they don't really have the faith they profess to have in us. Madison makes these themes deeply felt, lending an emotional grounding to what could have been a too-slick roller-coaster ride.

What an unexpected triumph. Turns out that they saved the very best movie of the summer for last.