Written by: Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong, S. P. Krause
Directed by: Greg McLean
Staring: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, Lucy Fry, David Mazouz, Ming-Na Wen, Matt Walsh, and Paul Reiser
Special Features: alternate ending and deleted scenes
From the box:
From the producers of The Purge and Insidious, comes this terrifying supernatural thriller starring Kevin Bacon (TV’s The Following) and Radha Mitchell (Silent Hill). When their young son (David Mazouz, TV’s Gotham) brings home five mystical stones he found on their family’s camping trip to the Grand Canyon, Peter (Bacon) and Bronny (Mitchell) begin to notice strange things happening in their house. Having awakened dark forces bound to the rocks, the family fights for survival as malicious demons feed off their fears and threaten to destroy them.
As far as Poltergeist rehashes go, The Darkness isn’t half bad. The parallels are definitely there, but thankfully The Darkness takes enough of a detour content wise to make it not seem like a complete rip-off. This time, we have a family terrorized by Native American ghosts after their autistic son discovers some old mystic stones and brings them home along with a new imaginary friend named Jenny.
What really elevates this film is the lore behind the ghosts or demons or whatever they end up being, it’s not exactly clear. I do feel like there were a lot of missed opportunities, including exploring the young Michael’s autism which in the end didn’t end up being all that important to the plot even though it seemed like it was going to. Kudos for including a character on the spectrum but it would have been nice to see it play some kind of a role in the story aside from an excuse for him to act strange.
The film presents a deeply flawed family which in and of itself was intriguing as it’s not a perfect family getting invaded by a darkness, it’s a family with its own darkness that has a new darkness to deal with. it was almost refreshing to see a family like this, more authentic.
The film is pretty creepy but I always felt like it stopped short of being truly terrifying. It’s good but it never reaches the greatness I think it could have.
Acting wise, the cast is great. Really nice performances and some “I didn’t know blah blah was in this” moments. The direction is good and the script was an admirable effort to make a trope haunted house film with some original elements we don’t often see. All in all a valiant effort.
As for the blu-ray, it’s pretty sparse on features with just a bananas alternate ending and some deleted scenes. I would have loved to see some featurettes on the Anasazi or more Native American lore here. The film does look and sound great as it should on the format.
Overall, some good creep factors, great performances, and fascinating lore keep The Darkness from being a waste of time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t all come together is a truly terrifying way but it’s definitely worth a late night watch.
The Darkness is available on DVD and Blu-ray now!
Garon Cockrell is the Founder and Editor of Pop Culture Beast and host of The Pop Culture Beast Show. He founded the site over seven years ago to have a place on the internet to write about the things he loved. Since then, Garon has become a best-selling author (Demonic and Other Tales), an award winning screenwriter (Best Screenplay 2013 Motor City Nightmares Film Festival), and a cast member on the top rated podcast, Never Not Funny.