Darkness Falls (2003)

               Movies are always worlds unto themselves. They operate by their own internal logic and set of rules that can swing wildly from mostly realistic to completely bananas. Even movies that are attempting to be grounded and realistic are inherently fictitious, and I don’t just mean the plot and characters. Nobody has to stand in line at the post office. Nobody has to visit three different restaurants before the wait time is acceptable. Nobody has an inconvenient burst of diarrhea during an important meeting. If anything like that does happen it’s inevitably going to become part of the plot or if it’s a comedy it’s going to end in a punchline. The gap between a straight drama like ‘Gods and Monsters’ and a fantasy adventure like ‘The Mummy’ is not all that wide, and not just because they both star Brendan Fraser.

              What straight dramas can get away with that more fantastical movies can’t is dropping audiences in the middle of the action without having an educational section where they bring everyone up to speed on the rules. Generally speaking, in these physics is going to operate the same as in the real world, the government structures and economies are going to be at least similar enough that it doesn’t have to be addressed, the basics are normal. Sometimes the plot’s going to be about assassinating the president or something, so maybe there needs to be either a scene or some visuals that clue in the audience that this one big thing is different but most everything else is the same. For fantasy and science fiction movies it can get tricky depending on how different everything is going to be. For something like ‘Star Wars,’ a film ostensibly without any connection to our reality, you have to kind of hand-hold the audience through the action until they get acclimated, maybe the spending the first third or so of your movie following around a naive hayseed who needs everything explained to him, thus giving everyone else an excuse to drop exposition to him and us.

              Horror isn’t any different. Whether it’s ‘Seven’ or ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ you have to let the audience know what threats characters will and won’t face. Brad Pitt doesn’t have to worry about Freddy showing up in his nightmares, and the kids in Springwood, Ohio don’t have to worry about John Doe running around town being all judgy. When the horror is supernatural in nature a certain amount of ambiguity is fine, even encouraged, but eventually we have to understand what the ghost or demon or monster or whatever can and can’t do. Quite often the plot of the movie is finding out that information and so the audience learns along with the characters. The only thing worse than not establishing any real rules is establishing rules and then breaking them.

              “Darkness Falls” is an example of a movie that fails along several different axes at once, but it’s such a piecemeal mess of a movie that it’s legitimately hard to know who’s ultimately at fault. The movie started life as a five-minute short film written and directed by Joe Harris called ‘The Tooth Fairy.’ It’s about a tooth fairy that gives money to good kids and death to bad kids. It’s even online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZ2TyaeHiI. This was acquired by Distant Corners Entertainment Group, a subdivision of Revolution Studios. Harris turned out a full script that was then rewritten by at least two other people, James Vanderbilt and John Fasano. Joe Harris has only had a couple of credits since, including co-writing something called ‘The Tripper,’ written and directed by David Arquette about a Reagan-obsessed serial killer. Sure. Vanderbilt has written on some … interesting movies in the years since this project, including ‘The Rundown,’ ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ 1 and 2, ‘White House Down,’ and fucking ‘Zodiac.’ Fasano is now a deep miner in the schlock mines, writing mainly tv movies like ‘Saving Jessica Lynch’ and ‘Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone.’ None of their work really inspires a whole lot of confidence, but the movie has been hacked to such shreds that it’s hard to assign any blame to the sections of the screenplay that survived.

              Directing was assigned to Jonathan Liebesman. This was his debut at the age of 26. He shortly afterwards directed ‘Rings,' the short that connected the first and second movies in that franchise. He got a bunch more attempts at becoming an established director, including the 2006 prequel ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning’ and a few tentpole features like the 2012 ‘Wrath of the Titans’ remake and the 2014 ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ The last few years he’s made the lateral move over to prestige tv, direction four episodes of the doomed ‘Halo’ show. The only part of his directing that I feel I can honestly criticize him for is his inability to shoot action coherently. Whenever there’s a physical confrontation or a chase scene the camera just waves around in the vague direction of what’s going on. It doesn’t even seem like it’s hand-held, it comes off like the Steadicam operator tripped on something and is desperately trying to maintain balance. The editing is shit too, but that’s mostly management’s fault.

              The cast is about as small as the budget. That’s not fair, the movie cost a completely reasonable $11 million and brought back in $47.5 million, so congrats all around for the success. There are really only three characters worth paying attention to, everyone else got their parts cut out from the movie. Our lead is named Caitlin Greene, played by Emma Caulfield Ford. The supposed lead is Kyle Walsh, played by Chaney Kley. In a normal movie Kyle would be the lead character, but so much of his backstory and characterization was cut out that he’s at best a co-lead. Caulfield Ford was still appearing in “Buffy: the Vampire Slayer” at the time of filming. Kley, who looks so much like James Roday Rodriguez in this movie it was incredibly distracting, only had a couple of small roles before landing the lead here. Caitlin’s much younger brother Michael is played by Lee Cormie, who appeared in a lot of Australian tv after he grew up a little more. Fun trivia fact: young Caitlin is played by Emily Browning, the little ghost girl from ‘Ghost Ship.’ She was having a nice little career at the turn of the millennium.

              So let’s talk about the length of the movie. On paper it’s eighty-four minutes and change, but that includes a full ten minutes and forty-three seconds of closing credits. Considering there’s a little ghost story at the beginning establishing the backstory of the monster of the film that’s just under three minutes long by itself, the movie proper is only seventy-two and a half minutes. I’ve mentioned in previous entries that obvious cuts are often made by studios to keep runtimes in the neighborhood of an hour and a half, everything by Dark Castle Entertainment has that ragged quality to them that means a company editor tore through them after the directors turned in their versions. This movie has multiple key sections chopped out to the point where they had to artificially extend the runtime with a very slow set of credits. To quote from the wiki: “After completion, the producers heavily truncated the final cut removing character backstory as well as expanded details on the Darkness Falls curse.” Keep this in mind as I race through the plot.

              As you’d expect from something expanded from a short called ‘The Tooth Fairy,’ the evil monster of the movie is called The Tooth Fairy. They could have gone a few different ways with this. You could make it some kind of fey creature that’s been asleep since the Middle Ages who has a very different idea of childhood traditions. You could do what Terry Pratchett did and have someone research or catch the real Tooth Fairy to gain access to its powers with dire consequences. Instead they did something very strange and just have a vengeful ghost who has a small part of her backstory that she used to give gold coins to the local children for their old teeth, thus gaining her the local nickname of The Tooth Fairy.

              While I can’t really fault the writers for things not making a whole lot of sense when all the backstory info as well as a lot of connecting scenes were ripped out of the final cut, I can certainly get angry with them for the stupidity that made it into the movie. Establishing the backstory of the vengeful ghost right up front is fine, I’ll even wave away the idea that in the 19^th century gold coins were worth the same as quarters are now, whatever. I’m also down with the idea that the lonely old woman got her face burned in a fire and started wearing a porcelain mask around town. What I refuse to buy is the idea that, as the movie’s opening narration puts it, “Matilda’s burned flesh was so sensitive to light she could only go out at night.” Her inability to stand bright light ends up being the central tension mechanism for the entire movie: is it light out, are the lights on inside, do I have my flashlight, are the emergency lights coming on, stay inside the light don’t go outside of the light! That’s not ghost Matilda who’s photophobic, by the way, that’s sad old lady Matilda. That’s just not how scar tissue works. I’m also mad at the fact that a couple of children went briefly missing so the town summarily hanged an old woman, only for the kids to turn up the next day fine and dandy. America in the 19^th century was all kinds of fucked up, apparently. This all supposedly explains why she turns into a vengeful spirit who comes to collect a child’s last baby tooth, and if anyone sees her face she kills them. As far as local legends go that turn out to be real I guess that’ll do, but it’s such a stupid way to get there. She was horribly scarred by fire, just make her scared of bright lights because she’s scared of fire!

              The first thing I noticed about the movie, other than the terrible editing, was that it doesn’t really have a first act. It has that fairy tale at the beginning, then there’s a prologue set in 1990 that establishes our two main characters, Caitlin and Kyle. Then it shows Kyle’s first encounter with The Tooth Fairy, which ends up with his mom getting killed and Kyle ending up institutionalized. That’s fine for a beginning, but in the next scene we jump right to the end of the first act. Oh, and this section lasts another eleven minutes, so the running total for how much of this movie takes place in the present is now down to a sold sixty-one minutes.

              Here’s where we loop back to what I had to say about movies and rules. Clearly this section with young Kyle is supposed to do several things at one: introduce the characters, set up the plot of the rest of the movie, introduce the monster, and explain the rules of how the ghost works. It does three of those things. Not very well, but it does them. We meet teenage Caitlin and Kyle and find out they really like each other. The ghost kills Kyle’s mom and basically curses him for life. The CGI ghost is kept mostly offscreen but the glimpses we get are suitably spooky. What it doesn’t do is establish any rules at all about how this version of The Tooth Fairy works. What we’re initially told is that if a child looks at her when she comes to collect their teeth they get killed. Fair enough. When we actually see the ghost in the movie it’s after she’s zipped around Kyle’s room for a long time while he’s hiding under the covers. Right from the beginning the ghost is cheating. If she can just hang around in a kid’s room all night making noises they’re all going to look eventually. And look Kyle does and he screams at the horrible sight of the monster.

              Then he doesn’t get killed, something we were firmly promised. The camera cuts to his mom asleep in bed who starts awake when she hears his yell. She rushes to his room and meets a perfectly intact Kyle at his door. He begs her not to go in but she does anyways, and since the ghost is still in there hanging out she gets got. The kid runs into the bathroom, turns out all of the lights, then huddles in the bathtub until morning. So rather than a ghost who plays by strict rules, this is a ghost who turns up under very specific circumstances and then can just do whatever she wants.

              The movie gets worse about this as the movie continues. Directly after this we get a jarring cut to ’12 Years Later’ and a grown up Caitlin is having another in what seems to be a long list of doctor consultations for her much younger brother. He’s apparently so scared of the dark he’s unable to sleep and is in danger of having psychotic breaks. The doctors have labelled this as night terrors, for some reason, and the only person Caitlin can think of to ask for advice is Kyle, who she hasn’t spoken to since he was institutionalized.

              I can make a pretty damn good guess about what scenes were cut out here. Keep the time jump but ease us into our reintroduction to Caitlin. Have her wake her brother up in the morning for a tense breakfast, he asks if she knows anyone with night terrors, she hesitates and then admits there’s this guy she used to know and she’s been meaning to look him up but it’s been so long, they have an appointment with the doctor and they have a tender conversation on the drive to the hospital. Then we can cut to some kind of introduction to adult Kyle, maybe while he’s meeting with his therapist about his obsessive fear of the dark, this would allow the shrink to list the seemingly crazy precautions he takes, they can refer to where he’s been the last twelve years, Caitlin’s name comes up and he admits to being too scared to reach out to her. None of this is particularly good, it’s just the functional set of scenes that would get you directly to this scene in the hospital where Caitlin reaches out to Kyle about Michael without it feeling like goddamn moon logic.

              There are even more ludicrous touches. Caitlin has a boyfriend who also grew up with her and Kyle and obviously feels threatened now that he’s turned up again. He essentially forces Kyle to get a drink with him and they go to a local hick bar. There a random guy drinking there who recognizes him and starts to pick a fight. Kyle just walks out, frustrated. So far the bones of all of this are fine. Then, as Kyle is leaning against a railing for a moment, the guy from the bar just spear-tackles him and they both go flying over the railing and into the woods. Kyle freaks out that he’s in the dark suddenly and the guy gets murdered by the ghost. None of that nonsense in the bar was led up to, none of it was subsequently justified. They just needed a way to get Kyle into the woods and that’s the best they could come up with.

              Wait a second, you may be thinking, if it’s been established that The Tooth Fairy can’t get you if you’re in the light, then why isn’t she getting him the second he gets tackled into the dark woods? That’s a very good question, and the answer is that a character either needs to be completely in the light, mostly in the light, or just kind of around the light, depending on the needs of the scene. In the woods, while he’s fumbling for his flashlight, Kyle is clearly almost completely in the dark, and even after he shines a flashlight on himself his feet are absolutely fair game. The rule seems to be that if any part of your body has some light on it, you’re fine. Apparently Matilda can’t just swipe at your edges or anything. There is a glorious scene later where characters have to get down a set of stairs with only the landings being lit and the actual stairs in darkness. The characters start jumping from light pool to light pool and each time they do one of them gets picks off by the monster swooping out of the darkness. Incredibly stupid scene.

              But wait another second, you may be thinking, if it’s been established that The Tooth Fairy only gets summoned by a kid losing a tooth, what’s summoning the monster now? There’s something of an excuse in that she’s apparently been after Kyle for the last twelve years and is currently after Michael, so she’s free to pop into existence around those two at any time. But that would mean that Kyle has somehow kept himself at least partially lit continuously for a full twelve years. This also implies that exactly zero children have lost their last baby tooth in this town for the last twelve years, or at least that the ones that did were pretty uncurious. There’s exactly one throwaway line where Kyle says something sarcastic to the local sheriff about all of the child murders in the town’s history, but that goes exactly nowhere.

              I do kind of like how stupid the ending is. Kyle of course has been locked up as a suspect for all of the ghost murders, and then Matilda does him the favor of openly attacking the police station while he’s there. She’s not so much driven off as she eventually just kind stops coming back. The survivors form a little ragtag group that makes its way to the hospital to save Michael. I mean, I assume they do, we don’t get to see any of that, but a couple of the cops show up at the hospital to get killed later so I’m guessing that’s what happened. The doctors we’ve met a couple of times also tag along for a little bit until they turn out to be bad at jumping down stairways.

              Eventually everyone alive makes it to the local lighthouse, which was established earlier so props to the movie for that. They get very lucky and attack Matilda in exactly the right order to kill her. First they blast her with the lighthouse lamp, then they set her on fire, then they knock her mask off, then they hit her with the lamp again. Pretty sure that was one of the cut boss fights from ‘Bloodborne.’ The ghost evaporates, the three survivors slump together in victory, and we are done with that plotline. We get a couple of extra minutes for a kicker scene where a kid puts his tooth under a pillow and then his mom comes in and exchanges it for some coins. Take out this little scene and the entire saga of adult Caitlin and Kyle comes to a whopping fifty-nine minutes and forty-eight seconds.

              Despite its short length there’s a decent amount of nonsense in here. I didn’t even get into the Scientology-adjacent stuff about how medicine and doctors are bad and not to be trusted. When he arrives in town for the first time in twelve years Kyle goes directly to the hospital and starts talking to Michael without checking in with either the staff or Caitlin, and when she discovers that he’s done this she instantly recognizes him and gives him a hug. Kyle is said to have become a game programmer after getting fostered into adulthood while at the same time we’re told he was institutionalized for nine of the past twelve years. Emma Caulfield Ford is nineteen years older than the actor playing her younger brother. They clearly originally meant for it to be her son but hastily rewrote it for some no-doubt dumb reason. Continuity errors are constant, which is something I don’t usually care about, but when the geography shifts from the top of the lighthouse to the bottom in a single edit even I have to call a little foul. There is exactly one scene that’s just character development, and it is a brief moment when Caitlin cries in a car. That is all you’re getting. This is a movie that is not scary and not even bad in an entertaining way.