Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
starring Kim Darby and Jim Hutton
Directed by John Newland
1973
74 minutes
Unrated

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
starring Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce
and Bailee Madison
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
2010
99 minutes
Rated R

When I was a little girl, I loved scary haunted house movies, as I do now. Of course, my parents were sensible and did not take me to see them at the movie theatre, so I had to watch them on television. One of the movies that made a big impression on me was Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. I had a hard time forgetting the creepy little creatures that came out of the fireplace and scared Sally (Kim Darby) to death. It didn't help that we had two fireplaces in our home and that my parents refused to brick them up to keep any creatures from getting out.

Imagine my joy to discover that the scariest movie of my childhood was remade by the famed director, Guillermo del Toro! True, there are changes, but the new version is equally great in its own right.

In the original movie, Sally and her husband Alex inherit a mansion from Sally's grandparents. They decide to keep it and fix it up. There is a mysterious room in the house that Sally finally breaks into and decides she would like to use it as a study, as her grandfather had done before her. The only problem with the room--the fireplace is mysteriously bricked up and the grate is bolted on tight. Sally asks the handyman, Mr. Harris (William Demarest),  about why this might have been done and how to undo it. Mr. Harris reveals that he was the one who bricked it up after her grandfather disappeared, and he has no plans to undo and advises that Sally leave it alone. And, of course, she doesn't!

I watched this version again recently on dvd and was struck by how scary this movie still is, despite the distractions of the 1970s clothing, hairdos, decor, and the obvious phony little creatures. Kim Darby is very good at playing the character of a rather shy woman who doesn't quite know how to deal her unusual problem. She is lucky that she has a friend, but her husband (Jim Hutton) just thinks she is neurotic. Would my husband believe me if I told him I was seeing scary little creatures in the house? He might tell me they are just the children and get over it.

Throughout the movie I was shouting comments: "Mr. Harris, please tell Sally why you blocked up the fireplace in the first place!" "Sally, don't open that grate--you'll be sorry!" "Knucklehead husband, take Sally on the trip with you so she won't be alone!" "Sally, don't drink that water! It has those sleeping pills in it!" "Friend Joan, just take Sally to your house!" "Sally, GET OUT OF THERE NOW!"

The new version directed by Guillermo del Toro is quite different, although the same basic premise is the same. Sally (Bailee Madison) is now a young child, which actually works quite well in the story. Children often "see" things that aren't there and the grown-ups don't believe them. They also "see" things that are there because they are often more observant than the grown-ups, and their imaginations do not impede their belief in the unlikely. This young Sally has been shipped off to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and is depressed about the change. To make matters worse, her father is living with a new "mom" figure, Kim (Katie Holmes).

The father, Alex, and Kim are renovating a giant historical mansion in Rhode Island, owned by the late Emerson Blackwood, a wildlife painter who mysteriously vanished after the also mysterious disappearance of his son. The house is a showcase! Filmed at the Drusilla Mansion in Mount Macedon, Victoria, Australia, the house has everything from a large library, parlors, amazing staircases, lots of bedrooms, a huge garden, and a secret room with a bolted up ash pit. Wow, how amazing!

The Druscilla Mansion in Australia

The Blackwood Mansion in Rhodes Island

I liked how del Toro tied the creatures to the fairy world, making them a very frightening version of the Tooth Fairy. Kids like Sally would have been responsive to the idea of tooth fairies, since we are all familiar with the stories, but some fairies are actually malicious, devious, and tricky in folklore. The old tales tell of fairies who capture humans and keep them hostage, never to return to their families again. You can read more about the many types of fairies here. There are several references to this sort of fairy lore in the movie, including a lovely fairy ring of mushrooms.

Little Sally seems rather more enterprising in the del Toro version. She is very thoughtful and stocks up on supplies to help her deal with the creatures, such as the camera and other sources of light. Her helplessness is quite understandable since she is only a child and can't go where she pleases, although she does try to get away by running away from home. But the unsympathetic parents bring her back and just make her go to bed--right where the creatures want her!

The creatures were more believable and scary in the newer version of this movie, but mostly because technology in film making has advanced so much. I personally wouldn't want to meet either of these types of creatures.

If you would like to see trailers for these movies, here are the links:

• 1973 Trailer
• 2010 Trailer

Shadows

Shadows
Book Two in the Ashes Trilogy
by Ilsa J. Bick
Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Audio
2012
Read by Katherine Kellgren
11 sound discs, 13.25 hours


Well, I finally made it through Book Two of this series. It was difficult, but I had to find out what happened to our main characters, who are:

• Alex, the girl whose parents died and was dying herself from a brain tumor--until the electromagnetic pulse wiped out most of mankind and changed the survivors into zombies;
• Tom, the soldier who survived Afghanistan only to find he might not survive the zombie apocalypse;
• and Ellie, the young girl who was taken by adults but then left in the wilderness and now is in danger of being eaten.

Shadows answers some of our questions, but since this is a trilogy, you know it won't answer all of them.

The book begins with a look at Tom. Remember, Tom had been seriously injured and Alex had left him at a convenience store to find help in the small village of Rule, which was rumored to be safe. Alex made it to Rule, but when she finally convinced a rescue party to came back, Tom was gone. It turns out Tom was rescued by a kind couple, Jim and Grace, along with their dog, Raleigh. They took him to their cabin in Wisconsin where he was allowed to heal and rest, although in extreme seclusion from all prying eyes. Even this early, Jim and Grace know how dangerous it would be for them and Tom if the neighbors and bounty hunters found out that they were harboring a young man who had not Changed.

At the end of Book One, Alex planned her getaway from Rule so that she can look for Tom and gets help from Jess, an older woman who took her in when she first arrived. There is more to that situation, too, as you will find out. But Alex quickly discovers that her getaway has put her right into a trap and she is captured by a band of Changed, or "Chuckies" as they are sometimes called now.

What is a Chucky, you might ask? For those of you who haven't seen the movies, Chucky is a doll character from a series of horror films, the Child's Play series. The soul of a notorious serial killer inhabits a doll and then continuously tries to transfer into a human body. The doll acts like the serial killer, using the guise of the innocent looking doll to wreak havoc and viciously mutilate people.

Bad Chucky, Good Chucky

Our Changed teens have gone from being normal, thinking humans to vicious, inhuman monsters, kidnapping people and saving them for dinner. And now Alex is captured by them! And surprise, Rule has been assisting these Changed by "feeding" them the banished citizens in order to keep their settlement protected. We are left wondering what is really going on here? Who are the bad guys and how did this all develop so quickly? Can we trust no one any more?

Most of this story is about Alex's time with the group of Changed and her reactions to what terrible things she witnesses. She is quite helpless to get away, and all she can do is hope that she won't be selected next. I feel like bad luck follows Alex around and that every time she could get help or get away, we are trapped right back in the horror.

Meanwhile, Tom has healed, but he is nearly captured by a snoopy neighbor. He manages to get away with the dog, Raleigh, but then trusts the wrong person, too. He is then rescued again from nearly being recaptured by bounty hunters, but finds himself taken by a rebel group who want to blow up the old mine near Rule where the Changed are bringing victims. Tom is perfect for this job, since he worked with bombs and explosives in Afghanistan, so there is no chance for him to escape and continue his search for Alex. To make matters worse, the leader of the rebel group may be a double agent who lies to Tom about Alex being locked up in Rule, when really he knows she has been taken by the Changed.

At the end of Book Two, Tom finds Alex just as the bomb is about to go off and he cannot rescue her. Peter, one of the two young men from Rule, is imprisoned by a crazy militant who has given him the choice of eating human flesh or dying. Chris, the other young man, has been banished and has now fallen victim of a trap made by the Changed to capture more dinner.

Now all along I have wondered what happened to the little girl, Ellie. She had been mentioned during Alex's stay in Rule as she "smells" the bad guy who took Ellie. When confronted, the man confessed to leaving Ellie alone in the wilderness. He was then banished from Rule. But has Ellie died? We get a hint of her later in this story, as Chris, Alex's ally in Rule, lies buried in the snow as a result of the trap. A little voice is heard calling "Mina!" which is the name of Ellie's dog. Can she really have survived and if so, how? And how will Chris get out of the trap?

This story contains intense descriptions, using lots of metaphors and similes, of how the Changed zombies eat. Too much slurp, crunch, smack, munch, etc., along with vividly expressed comparisons of what the zombie feasting tastes, smells, sounds, and feels like for me. It becomes very hard to take after awhile. I get already that the Zombie Apocalypse would NOT be pleasant! I found myself wishing that the action would move faster, beyond the all-too-horrible descriptions.

I still want answers to my questions about how any of these can end at all well for Alex, Tom, and Ellie. There are too few normal people left from the zap that ended normal life, but we can only hope that once we get out of this small part of Michigan, we can find real help. And who are the real monsters here? I am beginning to think that the pulse changed everyone's brains in some way, even if they didn't turn into zombies. The older people may look normal and trustworthy, but they soon exhibit dangerous, ruthless behavior, too, that is probably scarier to me than that of the Changed.

I am not looking forward to more zombie feast descriptions, but I suppose I will try to read the third book, just to get some resolution if nothing else.

The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh

The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh
starring Aaron Poole, Vanessa Redgrave 
Directed by Rodrigo Gudiño
2012
84 minutes
Unrated

Here is a very unique ghost story by Canadian director, Rodrigo Gudiño, making his debut into horror movies with The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh. This movie has one actor on the screen for the entire film, a man named Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole), the estranged son of Rosalind who has just died. Rosalind is still present in the house and we hear her story told by Vanessa Redgrave who tries to explain her situation to her son.  Besides the physical presence of Leon and the voice presence of Rosalind, we have a third major character, the atmospheric presence of Rosalind's astonishing and eerie house.

Rosalind Leigh, a member of a strange angel cult called God's Messengers, has just died in mysterious circumstances. Her son, Leon, an antiques dealer comes to her home, a house he has never visited while she lived there as Rosalind's voice informs us, to tidy up her estate. When he arrives he finds a house overwhelmingly full of antiques, many of them religious in nature. We also learn through a phone call that Rosalind has been buying up antiques that Leon has sold through his business agent, and Leon is naturally unhappy to find out that his mother has purchased these items, supporting him without his knowledge.

"Do you believe in angels?"

Through the course of the movie, we learn more about why Leon left home and refused to see his mother. Leon's father, another cult member, committed suicide, but the cult leaders were exonerated. His mother continued in the cult, trying to indoctrinate her son, her own "angel", into the cult beliefs. She had a ritual "game of candles" that she would use to try to get Leon to say he believed or else the angels among us would turn his back on him and he would lose their protection. It didn't work and he rejected her beliefs and eventually ran away never to return.

We follow Leon's exploration of the house. The camera shots are very interesting throughout the movie, not only following Leon's action, but panning the rooms showing all of artifacts of Rosalind's life. The set designer was very good at designing a house that is crowded without being absolutely cluttered, and also creating a very gothic atmosphere. Here and there are more personal touches left by Rosalind, including her photograph and several wall samplers with mysterious adages placed around the house that add to the ominous feeling.

"If a fork, it will be neither a man nor woman."

You might think this would be a boring movie, just following this guy around an old creepy house, looking at old stuff. But then things happen that are unexplained. Leon takes some items down to the basement and finds an angel figurine that brings back unpleasant memories of the "game of candles". When he heads back upstairs, the lights go out, so he heads back to look for the fuse box. Then the lights go back on. We see the angel figurine again on the television in the living room and Leon panics and calls his former girlfriend/psychiatrist. She talks him down from the panic, but things are not the same for Leon in the house. He has an visitor at the door (after dropping a fork during dinner), a neighbor who is also a cult member who tries to get Leon to come to a meeting. We see Rosalind's video on television of a meeting that shows evidence that she was still heavily involved in the mysterious cult. Watch out for the large angel statue, though.

Inside Rosalind Leigh's bedroom shrine

Leon finds the key to his mother's bedroom inside the angel figurine and unlocks the door. It is an odd room with a stairway down into darkness. Of course Leon goes down the stairs and we must follow. There we find the scene of the video, full of angel figures and other religious symbols. What was this room really used for?

The scariest part of the movie is the monster that comes from the back garden. It looks dog like and ferocious, and we think that Leon has managed to lock it out, but it somehow gets into the house, terrorizing him in his sleep. What unearthly creature is it? Maybe it is the loneliness that Rosalind hints at that "ate" her alive, waiting for her son to come back to her.

The ending of this movie was a surprise for me. I won't give it away, but part of the horror is that we are left wondering who really is the ghost here. Is it Rosalind, the dead woman who has been talking to us and her son after her death? Is it Leon, who may or may not have really been in the house at all? Or is it the house itself? Maybe it's all three. Watch and decide for yourself.

The Waking Dark

The Waking Dark
by Robin Wasserman
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
2013
454 pages




This is a fairly new horror book for teens by author Robin Wasserman. I had not read any of her books and the premise of this one appealed to me, but in many ways it fell short of my expectations.

This book is full of action but it is really disjointed. It took me nearly 100 pages to figure out who were the main characters of the book. They are:

• Daniel Ghent: son of the crazy Preacher, survivor of a drug store shooting, brother of 8-year-old Milo
• Jule Prevette: niece of the local meth producer, seeking to get away from her life, survivor of a family stabbing incident
• Ellie King: a very devout teen who yearns to help her town but becomes a martyr instead, witness of the crucifixion of the church handyman by the religious leader at her church
• Jeremiah West: gay member of the football team, witness of an inexplicable hit and run accident of his friend, Nick
• Cassandra Porter: typical teenage girl until she dropped the baby boy she was babysitting out of a second story window and yet has no memory of doing it

The main catalyst for this story is a tornado which wipes out part of Oleander, Kansas. The disaster leaves the town shocked and people come together to clean up, but then the citizens begin to notice something strange. Although their cell phone and internet service is down, they had imagined that government volunteers and television crews would be descending on their town and helping everyone get back to normal. What happens instead is that their town is surrounded by supposed military personnel who enclose the entire town and tell everyone they are not allowed to leave "for their safety".

Tornado over Greensburg, Kansas in 1915

This is when things go drastically wrong. People begin to act in ways that are either uncharacteristic or more extreme, and never in a good way. They begin to commit crimes against each other, raiding stores, assaulting  and murdering people, looking for scapegoats such as Cassandra, who has escaped her nearby mental institution during the storm and has come back to hide near her home. Before too long, the people of the town have descended into the "dark" that has awakened in their minds and anarchy reigns. 

We don't learn what has caused the change until Cassandra and the doctor from her facility, who was captured, too, and thrown in the town's prison, escape with help from our other teenagers. The doctor is forced to tell the kids what she knows. They learn that they alone were given immunity to a drug called R8-G through their flu shots which, combined with a local natural condition that was aggravated by the tornado, is the perfect chemical weapon. The nearby facility was not a mental hospital/prison, as folks believed, but a chemical company's home base where they could experiment on the local population. Cassandra was injected with the drug, which led to hallucinations and caused her to black out when she committed her murder of the baby. R8-G causes people to commit atrocities to each other, quickly developing to a mass extermination of a population, I guess just to see what would happen. The company is keeping the town hostage while the drug continues to take effect, knowing that the end means that no one will survive.

I admire the teens who gradually find each other and band together to get out. They not only want to help themselves but they want to help the town. It is a small town and most people know each other. It is unfortunate that not all of our main characters could be saved, and the remainder feel and express real regret about that.

What I most disliked about the story was its lack of structure, its rambling prose that has trouble getting to the point. As I said before, Wasserman really took her time getting to the main action of the story and identifying the main characters and plot lines. We don't even learn about the fake government agency angle and the mind-altering drug explanation until Chapter 12, page 314. The insertion of "Oh, by the way" facts about the characters throughout the story was rather distracting and didn't help the story progress, or at best, just confused it. I don't necessarily object that we follow the story lines of several characters, but I think spending more time with them one at a time would have worked better. Also, focusing in on the main action instead of taking tangents all over the place would make a much tighter story. I think a good 100 pages could have been cut from the entire book by tightening up the story and removing tedious, superfluous details.

I would say this story is geared towards middle teens. It is a self-contained story, with no sequel-to-come feeling. While I didn't feel it was a complete waste of time reading it, I wouldn't put it on my best teen horror book list.

Monument 14: Sky on Fire

Monument 14: Sky on Fire
by Emmy Laybourne
New York: Feiwel and Friends
2013
217 pages



Well, if you read Monument 14 book and my earlier blog post, you will want to read this book which comes next. Compared to the first one, however, this one is more "fluff". That's not to say that it doesn't continue the horror. It just doesn't have as much substance in plot, character development, and descriptive passages as the first book. That's not necessarily a bad thing and I will explain further.

The action of the story has been divided into two viewpoints. We have Dean's, with Astrid, Chloe, Henry, and Caroline left in the Greenway. They are Blood Type O and, when exposed to the dangerous chemicals let loose in the atmosphere, they become raging monsters. With their concern for the smaller children, they have decided that it is better to stay and await rescue than endanger the others who left in the bus.

Dean's brother, Alex, travelling with Nico, Josie, Sahalia, Max, Ulysses, and Batiste, tells the story of the bus rescue crew. This is our first glimpse of the world outside the Greenway and it is scarier than we could have imagined. The bus doesn't haven't a clear windshield and seeing through the plexiglass makes the world look foggy. Someone has placed big, battery-powered floodlights along the highway, so it isn't completely dark. Despite the daytime hours, there is very little light coming from the sun which is obscured by dense clouds.  The roads are cracked, but a sort of path has been cleared for the bus to pass through. Cars are everywhere but there is something strange about them. A white fungus has eaten the tires and is spreading away from the cars. What is it?

Seeing the world so devastated makes it hard to remember that we are only on  Day 12 after the world ended as these kids knew it, less than two weeks.

Of course, we don't expect anything to be easy for either group of children. Back at the store, Dean and Astrid have new problems. Outsiders have seen the light from the opening when the bus went out and they try to get in. They take pity on some other strangers and throw food down to them from the roof, but this only leads to others coming and crashing into the store. The bus is taken over eventually by militant and paranoid older teens, who turn all of our small heroes out and leave them, first finding out where they came from. Of course, this spells further disaster for the Greenway kids and Alex and Nico know it. Somehow they have to walk the remaining 40 miles to Denver, all with masks and several layers of clothing, no food, blisters, and danger everywhere. And three of them are small children.

How do you eat in one of these things?

I said earlier that I felt like this was a "fluffier" book than the first one. Perhaps the main problem for me is that, because of the two story lines, we see more action rather than character development. I feel like I understand the main characters fairly well from the first book, but the new people they encounter just seem bad with no explanation or background behind them. We encounter only two kind helpers along the way to Denver: Max's Auntie Jean and an old man named Mario Scietto who takes the kids in for a couple of nights. I like more background and description in my stories, rather than so much dialogue, but since we are being told this story by the two brothers and they do not have the luxury of reflection time, I guess that could be too much to expect. The action is steady and tense, and I want to see these children come out okay.

Lucky for everyone, the bus kids make it to the Denver Airport and it really is a refuge and not just a rumor. The parents of some of the kids are found, and another parent helps with a daring rescue of the Greenway kids just in the nick of time. The book ends with the possibility of another book to come, since Josie is still separated from the rest. These kids have become a family, to themselves and to me, a fact reinforced by the change in Sahalia from a pouty girl who wants to prove how grown up she is, without really understanding what that means, into a big sister who cares for the others and wants to protect them. I want to see how things turn out for them. I will be watching for Book Three in this series.