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Sep. 2nd, 2011 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreDon't Be Afraid of the Dark is not a great movie or anything, but it is a perfectly serviceable horror flick and a fun way to spend a couple hours. I have very little other than that to say about it, but here are a few tiny and slightly spoilery things:
- The "children's teeth" thing is stupid. The critters are creepy enough without it and it doesn't add anything interesting to the plot. I can see that they were thinking of some sort of tooth fairy thing, but that never quite gets off the ground and doesn't go anywhere. It does add an extra layer of awful to the first scene, but that's about it.
- When the maid went down the stairs in the basement, my brain went "What I want for Christmas is please go away." (Have you seen The Stone Tape? You should watch The Stone Tape - it's pretty awesome. Though that may be the best line in the whole thing.)
- The runes over the grating say "Be afraid", in case there are other people who wanted to know but either couldn't read runes or didn't spend several minutes of the film trying to figure it out. Now, as to why there are runes over the grating when there's no other ties to Norse whatsit at all, I could not tell you. Still, I enjoyed puzzling them out.
- The house is pretty badass. I would live there, if not for the critters in the basement who want to eat people.
- Points for mentioning Arthur Machen! Let's have more Machen in horror films. (Someday, someone will make a movie that references The Repairer of Reputations and then my life will be complete.)
- Though, for all the Machen mentioning, I'm pretty sure that must have been the Miskatonic Library she ended up at. Seriously, a public library that looks like that, with helpful (creepily helpful) librarians who really really want to take you down into the basement to talk about mysterious bequests to the library and local folklore, complete with the deaths and disappearances of prominent citizens from over a century ago, all at 15 minutes before closing? I know the film is set in Rhode Island but I still say that library was somewhere in Arkham.
And those are my thoughts.
- The "children's teeth" thing is stupid. The critters are creepy enough without it and it doesn't add anything interesting to the plot. I can see that they were thinking of some sort of tooth fairy thing, but that never quite gets off the ground and doesn't go anywhere. It does add an extra layer of awful to the first scene, but that's about it.
- When the maid went down the stairs in the basement, my brain went "What I want for Christmas is please go away." (Have you seen The Stone Tape? You should watch The Stone Tape - it's pretty awesome. Though that may be the best line in the whole thing.)
- The runes over the grating say "Be afraid", in case there are other people who wanted to know but either couldn't read runes or didn't spend several minutes of the film trying to figure it out. Now, as to why there are runes over the grating when there's no other ties to Norse whatsit at all, I could not tell you. Still, I enjoyed puzzling them out.
- The house is pretty badass. I would live there, if not for the critters in the basement who want to eat people.
- Points for mentioning Arthur Machen! Let's have more Machen in horror films. (Someday, someone will make a movie that references The Repairer of Reputations and then my life will be complete.)
- Though, for all the Machen mentioning, I'm pretty sure that must have been the Miskatonic Library she ended up at. Seriously, a public library that looks like that, with helpful (creepily helpful) librarians who really really want to take you down into the basement to talk about mysterious bequests to the library and local folklore, complete with the deaths and disappearances of prominent citizens from over a century ago, all at 15 minutes before closing? I know the film is set in Rhode Island but I still say that library was somewhere in Arkham.
And those are my thoughts.
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Date: 2011-09-03 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-03 12:32 am (UTC)