Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 24, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It may be scientifically impossible for a movie to contain less plot than Darkness Falls and still qualify as a feature. Minus the remarkably elongated credits, it runs a scant 74 minutes—yet still finds time to throw in a “cat scare.”
Like last year’s They, Darkness Falls is concerned with a child’s night terrors physically manifesting in the protagonist’s young adulthood. They certainly had its flaws, but compared to Darkness, it seems a masterpiece of psychological depth and storytelling ingenuity. The only moments in Darkness that are halfway scary occur in the lengthy opening sequence, which focuses on a boy named Kyle (Joshua Anderson), who has just lost his last baby tooth even though he appears to be about 11 or 12, and is old enough to receive a nighttime visit from potential girlfriend Caitlin (Emily Browning). Later that evening, a much nastier female caller—a monstrous incarnation of the Tooth Fairy—leaves his mother dead and the boy with a paralyzing fear of the dark. Twelve years later, Caitlin (Buffy’s Emma Caulfield) calls on Kyle (Chaney Kley) for help with her little brother Michael (Lee Cormie), who is similarly plagued by the Tooth Fairy.
The stage is interestingly set for an exploration of how an adult and child handle the same deep-rooted phobia, and a developing relationship between the two as one helps the other. Instead, the only thing the filmmakers could think to have happen was for Kyle to get called a “freak” in a bar by a local roughneck, who precipitates a brawl in the woods and gets killed by the Tooth Fairy, with Kyle accused of the crime and thrown in jail. He gets bailed out by a local lawyer who’s a friend of Caitlin’s, but then the lawyer gets killed by the Tooth Fairy and Kyle gets thrown back in jail.
And that, believe or don’t, takes us past the movie’s halfway point, shortly before the movie descends into ever-more-implausible setpieces, some of them done with shaky-cam photography and hyperactive editing that make it near-impossible to tell what’s going on. Contributing to the high disbelief factor is the movie’s inability to establish or maintain convincing rules for its monster. The Tooth Fairy, a.k.a. Matilda Dixon, is set up in a prologue montage that’s pointlessly overcomplicated (she was disfigured by fire not once but twice—no wonder she’s pissed) and has little bearing on anything that happens in the movie’s main body.
Nor do her actions in the present make sense on their established terms. If she was betrayed by adults, as the prologue informs us, why does she now prey on children? Why are Kyle and Michael, in incidents separated by a dozen years, apparently the only ones to have invoked her wrath? How does it work that anyone who is around someone who glimpsed the Tooth Fairy in childhood is now able to see her, when they presumably never could before? We’re told that looking at her is what sets her after you, yet she only comes out in the dark—is there a specific degree of darkness gloomy enough for her to emerge, yet light enough for her to be visible? And wasn’t all this “Stay in the light!” stuff done much better in Pitch Black?
Fortunately, you won’t have to spend too long pondering these questions before the climax, featuring the highly touted Stan Winston monster (a decent creation, but nothing that required an artist of Winston’s stature), arrives and the abbreviated running time is over. It’s entirely likely that there’s material on the cutting room floor that makes all of Darkness Falls’ dubious moments go down easier, but unfortunately I’m bound to review the film that’s on the screen. This may be one case where we have to wait for a DVD extended cut to truly judge the filmmakers’ work.
