STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT:
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and its small-screen Predecessor

– Kier-La Janisse

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It’s been two decades since Guillermo Del Toro bought the rights to remake a little film that scared the bejeezus out of him as a child – and now, the hotly anticipated demonic fantasy Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark finally makes its way to the big screen with first-time feature film helmer Troy Nixey behind the camera best online generic levitra and Del Toro himself as producer and co-writer.

Almost a companion film to Del Toro’s own fantastical Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark features a child at its core – in this case Sally (Bailee Madison), a young girl navigating through her parents’ divorce who is reluctantly sent to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) in the creepy old Victorian house they’re renovating. Feeling neglected and lonely, Sally is the perfect conduit for tiny monstrous entities that dwell deep within a mysterious pit in the basement, who lie in wait for lost cialis cheap delivery souls such as hers.

Comic book artist Troy Nixey won accolades all over the festival circuit in 2007 for his CGI/live action dark fantasy hybrid Latchkey’s Lament, and his vision for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark explores the gothic in all its psychologically decrepit glory: a little girl trapped in the wilderness of an old house as unfamiliar creatures roam behind the walls and under the floorboards, beckoning her to play with them forever …and ever. As with Del Toro’s earlier films, the fantasy is a means of exploring childhood dissociation and emotional distress. This is indeed Del Toro’s stamp, as the original Sally is a suburban housewife suffering from very different emotional problems – namely sexual frustration and dismissal by her busy husband – issues that were everywhere discernable in post-counterculture horror.

John Newland’s original Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark aired on October 10, 1973 as part of ABC’s popular Movie-of the-Week series, which had been running strong since 1969 and producing some of the most solid genre pictures of the era – films like Curtis Harrington’s How Awful About Allan (1970), The House That Would Not Die (1970), Crowhaven Farm (1970), Steven Spielberg’s seminal early gearhead-horror film Duel (1971), Haunts of the Very Rich (1972), Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973), Satan’s School for Girls (1973), Dan Curtis’ The Norliss Tapes (1973), not to mention Curtis’ small-screen phenomena The Night Stalker (1972) which introduced the grizzled vampire-hunter Carl Kolchak to the world.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

But despite the pioneering and radical films that flanked it on all sides in the ABC lineup, the original Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark remains one of the most beloved and terrifying programs ever made for television. Kim Darby (the mom from Better Off Dead) stars as a passive, nervous housewife who moves into a big Victorian buy cheapest viagra online house with her husband, who is often away on business. While redecorating she opens up a brick-up fireplace, against the caretaker’s adamant but cryptic warning to leave it be. But once the seal is broken, Sally starts to see little creatures everywhere – on the stairs, in the bathroom. Her husband thinks she’s crazy, and her best friend thinks she’s just not getting enough attention (i.e. getting laid enough). But Sally’s new friends are out for blood. A big creepy house, scary whispers, dark lighting, a downbeat ending; the classic horror tenets are used to maximum effect in this essential gem of 70s horror cinema.

Director Newland was already a vet of the genre by this point, having helmed and hosted the early 60s supernatural reality show One Step Beyond, as well as episodes for Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and The Sixth Sense.  And like Nixey, he understood how to light a horror film, using shadows to create visual unreliability and anxiety.

The new Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, updated with contemporary thematic concerns and FX that expound significantly upon the original budget-limited creature designs – while maintaining the pervasive terror of the original – promises to be the stuff of nightmares for generations to come.

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DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (2011) has its Canadian Premiere August 4 at 9:10pm in the Hall Theatre, preceded by the Strong Brothers’ short film THE DUNGEON MASTER. More info on the film page HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, cialis generic drug founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2020.