Darkness Falls (2003)
horror
directed by : Jonathan Liebesman
featuring : Chaney Kley - Emma Caulfield - Lee Cormie - Grant Piro - Sullivan Stapleton
running time : 1 hour 26 minutes
Children have a very good reason to be afraid of the dark in this flashy horror story. Matilda Dixon was a genially eccentric woman who, in the 1850s, lived in a New England town known as Darkness Falls. Matilda was well known to the local children for her habit of paying them for teeth they'd lost, but when two youngsters mysteriously disappeared, Matilda was lynched by an angry mob wrongly convinced that she had murdered the kids. In the year 2002, former Darkness Falls resident Kyle Walsh (Chaney Kley) lives in Las Vegas and is still desperately afraid of the dark since a childhood run-in with the ghost of Matilda Dixon left him severely traumatized. While police and psychiatrists scoffed at Kyle's stories about Matilda's spirit, his childhood friend Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) is alarmed when her nine-year-old brother Michael (Lee Cormie) begins having nightmares very much like those which disturbed Kyle's rest for years. Like Kyle, Michael has little luck convincing most grown-ups that the white-robed specters he sees in the dark are real, so Caitlin asks Kyle to return to Darkness Falls to help get to the bottom of his story. Darkness Falls marked the directorial debut of filmmaker Jonathan Liebesman.

Darkness Falls is set in the kind of bucolic New England town where Stephen King might set one of his horror tales, but even King probably wouldn't set his story in a town called Darkness Falls, and he would most likely try to maintain some kind of logical consistency and develop compelling characters, even if his story was built around a trite premise like a psychotically belligerent tooth fairy. This one can only function in darkness. A similar hook was at work in the far more entertaining and imaginative science fiction flick, Pitch Black, a few years before Darkness fell. The other major plot device, the oddly prescient little boy (Cormie) threatened by unseen forces, has been a horror movie staple since the success of The Sixth Sense, Kley is competent as Kyle, the one adult who knows what's going on. His love interest, Caulfield, justifiably praised for her work as Anya on TV's Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is given disappointingly little to do here beyond run, hide, and scream. Darkness Falls has a few effectively tense moments, but it too often settles for played-out easy jolts like the sudden appearance of a face at a dark window or a kitty cat leaping out of nowhere onto the roof of a car, accompanied by a musical shriek on the soundtrack, just to make sure the less cliché-weary members of the audience jump in their seats.