Darkness Falls (2003)
During 1836, in the town of Darkness Falls, Maine, an elderly widow Matilda Dixon is adored by the town’s children as she gives them a gold coin whenever they lose a tooth. One day, after a house fire, Matilda is left burned and sensitive to sunlight, so she starts wearing a china mask. When two children are reported missing, Matilda is blamed by some locals, dragged from her home and hung. She curses the town, stating that whenever a child loses their last tooth, she would come for it. If the child looks at her, she will kill them. The missing children are subsequently found, so the citizens cover up their unjust lynching. In 1990, young Kyle Walsh awakes one night to find Matilda Walsh standing over him. Kyle’s mother is killed and he is blamed for her death and institutionalised. 12 years later, Kyle (Channey Kley) is released and tries to warn the town of the imminent danger when lightning disables the power supply. He is ignored by all until the deaths begin.
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, Darkness Falls is a functional horror vehicle which focuses more upon jump scares and tension, rather than explicit horror. It has a lean running time of 86 minutes and efficiently gets from A to B narratively. However, this is at the expense of any wider detail other than the immediate plot at hand. The studio allegedly excised what it considered to be superfluous backstory, character development and ambiguity about the supernatural threat, preferring a short sharp shock over a slow burn. Also, the inspiration for this feature length movie was a short film, again raising the question about there being sufficient material to sustain the story. As it stands, the characters sequentially appear on screen, providing the bare minimum of exposition before the film segues into a series of set pieces. The ending is functional, providing a suitable climax and closure.
The cast and performances are acceptable by genre standards. The most generous thing that can be said is that the characters are mostly harmless and the one annoying individual is dispatched very quickly. The score by Tyler Bates is not especially memorable but is eminently suitable for such generic cinema fare. The minor highlight of the film is Stan Winston’s creature design. Winston was brought in, as he often was, to replace another effects company whose concepts were deemed “unsatisfactory”. However, it is something audiences only get to see in the final ten minutes of the film. Overall, it would appear that the studio decision to edit the film down to the bone, has turned a potentially interesting horror movie into a merely adequate one. As it stands, Darkness Falls is the sort of film you watch when you’re tired and can’t be bothered to put something else on.
Roger Edwards