As much as I love a good horror, it is the genre least likely to surprise or impress me. It seems as though it has all been done before and there is very little creativity left in that arena. It takes a special kind of writer or film maker to be able to rehash old stories in new ways to still deliver the necessary shocks.
The ‘found footage’ of The Blair Witch Project is but one example of a successful story that was soon lost to lazy copycat cash cows that made the film die a fast Hollywood death by making its uniqueness commonplace.
It was with some surprise therefore that the biggest shock of the Australian supernatural thriller The Fear of Darkness was that I didn’t see the twist coming and it played me for a fool the entire way through. I was creeped out and glued to the screen until the end.
The atmospheric soundscapes by Joshua Beattie had a lot to do with it. The menacing music bubbled along underneath the action, turning even the most mundane conversations into something more sinister. If there was any true star of the show, it would be Beattie.
The film’s title comes from the name of the book released by the central character Sarah Faithfull, an expert psychologist played with conviction by Maeve Dermody. When Faithfull becomes involved in the mysterious murder case of a guy who died within a locked room, the mind games begin and we’re forced to distinguish what’s real and what’s not.
The primary suspect in the case is Skye Williams (Penelope Mitchell), a woman indulging in DMT, a hallucinogenic drug, and claiming that her imaginary childhood friend, Emily, is responsible for the death.
Director and writer Christopher Fitchett doesn’t make this a trite scare-per-minute horrorfest. Like the un-Beattie-ble underscore, he underplays the horror, offering some genuine shocks but opting ultimately to delivering atmosphere over cheap thrills. He has managed to script a story reminiscent of M Night Shyamalan in his heyday of The Sixth Sense in that the final twist is unexpected but, retrospectively, blatantly obvious. Every element that nags at your subconscious makes sense in the end. The film’s tagline even tells you so: “It’s not just in your mind”.
The cast are stellar, with mostly solid characters. The cops are perhaps the least successful, being unlikeable, two dimensional stereotypes compared to the complexities of the central figures. That’s no reflection on the actors who do their best with what they’re given.
The Fear of Darkness is yet another low-profile Aussie film that deserves better publicity than it got and certainly one worth checking out for fans of the supernatural horror genre.
Reviewed by Rod Lewis
Twitter: @StrtegicRetweet
Rating out of 10: 8
The Fear of Darkness is available now on Blu-ray and DVD.
More News
