fine whine

Today I watched Darkness, directed by Spain’s Jaume Balagueró. I was no more impressed than I was scared, and the movie was about as scary as petting our cat*. Apparently well regarded as thrilling or original, I found the movie to be derivative, slow, and dull. Had it not been made a year or two before Ju-on: the Grudge or its remake (Sam Raimi’s The Grudge) I would have assumed that its evil house had been lifted from the Japanese film. Alas, it predates them, but follows who knows how many iterations of The Amityville horror and its ilk, and from what little I’ve seen, it doesn’t add much to the haunted house genre.

It doesn’t add much to anything, nearest I can tell. Harsh lighting and ‘dramatic shadows’ I’ve seen before, and done better. Excessively shaky cameras and lightning-fast editing are nothing new, and anymore they just distract me. Ghostly children appearing and disappearing I’ve seen before, and perhaps better. Thunder and lightning used to elevate tension I’ve seen before, and it rarely works. Likewise walls that bleed. A father driven to madness, banging on doors among other insanity, I’ve seen before, and one movie about that is pretty much enough. Ancient arcane rituals in otherwise ordinary situations has been a mainstay of many a movie or X-files episode, and frankly they never did much for me either. Ostensibly normal people seeking to manifest the ultimate evil just isn’t one of my favorite plots, I guess. Loud, jarring scratchy noises and blurry shapes darting across the foreground, out of focus aren’t anything new either, though I cannot recall where I’ve seen that before. If I were to list all of the movies I saw in this one (from The Shining to The Sixth Sense to The Grudge to The Others and so many others, too many to list) I’d give up long before I was done, and I’d probably just find some of those movies that did well what Darkness tried to crib or cobble together.

I think it’s becoming obvious that perhaps horror thrillers just aren’t my thing. I recognize that dread and foreboding point the new direction the genre seems to be taking, where irony and postmodernism had until recently been the only way to go. Either approach needs to be crafted well to result in something I’ll enjoy, and for all the work that obviously went into Darkness, it sure is light on originality.

* Which served as a welcome distraction from much of the movie, I must admit.