The tooth fairy angle is so little mined or developed that it sometimes seems the best part of the story must have gotten censored or lost.Ī flawed, routine horror film, Darkness Falls nevertheless rises a bit above the level of shlock. She is in the main some kind of goblin spirit impervious to injury, unless at the given moment of the story it's decided she can be injured by teeth & maybe by bright light & fire. The nature of defeating the monstrous hag has no rational sense to it. Kyle's childhood friend Caitlin (Emma Caufield) has a baby brother Michael (Lee Cormie) who is hospitalized for extreme "night terrors." Kyle's the first person willing to confirm Michael's experience as real, his terror justified. And I have to wonder at the incompetence of any psychiatrist who drugged & hospitalized him even if the doctors did believe he hallucinated strange stuff in childhood.Ī lot of this padding is exactly that kind of ill conceived characterization & gives the film big demerits. In fact he seems a bit like a male model poser instead of a recovering fruitcake. He's also presumedly been institutionalized for several years, but he's really not very eccentric, & doesn't seem like a guy who has until recently had his decisions made for him by other people. The script doesn't seem to cover this adequately. If it's the latter he shouldn't be on the meds. Kyle is "on meds" either because his childhood experience drove him mad, or because people think he's mad for believing those experiences were real. But if you do see her face, the jig is up, you're doomed. Since a child has to see her face before she is empowered to cause harm, the childhood belief in protection by hiding under the covers & closing your eyes real tight actually does work. Her vengeful spirit targets select children, but will also kill every adult who stands in the way of the chosen victim.
As a kid he escaped the evil clawing clutches of Matilda Dixon, known as "the tooth fairy," a woman executed in a previous century. Kyle (Chaney Kley) returns to his hometown of Darkness Falls, still haunted by unbelievable childhood memories of gloom & terror. But the middle portion is all padding, & even at that Darkness Falls does not quite reach your average feature length. It has a moody prologue culminating in the first shock, & a "big" climax inside the lighthouse with a load of FX. By relying on loud noises more than actual event to make everyone jump, it earned a PG-13 rating, which for a horror film is tantamount to a tepidity warning. But it's not actually as spooky or frightening as it should've been.
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It's full of "Boo!" style startles induced by the soundtrack, & an animated tooth fairy hag ghost rather fun to see in her swirl of garments.
The combination is not sewn together very smoothly, but at least it's not the "same old thang."
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But her last words, a pledge to enact her revenge on the very children she once so lovingly attended, resonated.Lighthouse ghost stories include The Fog & remake (1980, 2005), Half Light (2006), Changeling (1979), Portrait of Jenny (1945), Tower of Evil (1972), Tormented (1960), & a great many others, with the theme spoofed in Hysterical (1983) & Scary Movie 3 (2003).ĭarkness Falls (2003) combines the lighthouse motif, rather incredibly, with the idea of the Tooth Fairy, plus the motif of executed witch's curse.
When a couple of kids disappeared one day, the town instantly blamed Matilda and hanged her when the kids turned up quite well and happy, the shame turned into a conspiratorial silence that sought to expunge the memory of Matilda from the town's collective conscience. But then she got caught in a house fire, had her face burned so badly she was forced to wear a mask and could never go out in the sunlight, and became the town pariah. Excuse me while I stifle a yawn.Īs is explained in a too-long opening narration (by an actor whose voice sounds like your favorite uncle trying to scare his 10-year-old grandson), Matilda Dixon was a kindly old lady who long ago handed out money to the children of Darkness Falls whenever they lost a tooth. What we don't get are any brains, any sense of anything new or any coherent plan beyond staging everything in the dark and having lots of things jump into the frame from outside of the frame.
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