“Don’t be Afraid of the Dark,” a reimagining scary 1973 TV movie of the same name, is a modern day gothic horror produced by shock maestro Guillermo del Toro. Set in Rhode Island it features things that go bump in the night, lots of shadows, mysterious voices, a creepy kid and even creepier little creatures.
Blackwood Manor, a stately old house where years earlier a famous painter had lost his son and mysteriously disappeared, is now it is the property of an ambitious designer (Guy Pearce) who is restoring the home in hopes of landing the cover of Architectural Digest. Instead his young daughter awakens some mysterious creepy-crawlies with a taste for little girls.
“Don’t be Afraid of the Dark” has a slow build to an exciting climax. The opening hour is chock-a-block with atmosphere and the hallmarks of gothic horror—like a groundskeeper who knows more than he is letting on, mysterious voices and hidden chambers—but is light on action. It plays like a family drama—the youngster is collateral damage in a nasty breakup between Pearce and his ex-wife—as seen through the lens of a genre filmmaker.
Mostly the first hour is Bailee Madison, as the young girl the little beasties find so appealing, alternatively acting out, whimpering or staring blankly in the age old creepy-kid horror film tradition.
It all leads to a satisfying climax, however, featuring swarms of cool creatures and enough ferocious fun to make the slow start worthwhile.
The ghost in Mexican-director Guillermo del Toro’s beautiful new tale of the supernatural owes more to films like The Haunting than to the malicious spirits that inhabited Poltergeist. Santi, the sad ghost of The Devil’s Backbone needs to tell his story to the living so he can find peace and exact his revenge. Set during the Spanish Civil War the story is built around the curiosity of Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a twelve-year-old boy delivered to a remote orphanage after his communist father is killed. Once there he unravels the true story of “the one who sighs,” a ghost that haunts the basement. Guillermo takes his time with the story, letting the feeling of anxiety and dread build slowly, layering the atmosphere with thick slices of mystery and the supernatural. That coupled with one of the best realized screen ghosts of recent memory make this movie both unsettling and worthwhile.
When I ask Guillermo Del Toro why his films often feature kids as main characters his answer is upfront, open and a little surprising.
“I had a horrible childhood, emotionally,” says the director of The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. “I was not a child who was beaten or locked in a closet, but I really have a very intense relationship with the horror of Catholic guilt and the dogma. My grandmother was like Piper Laurie in Carrie. I was like a chubby version of Carrie. It was very difficult for me to get over that.
“I jokingly say I spent 40 years trying to recuperate from the first eight, but to a degree it is true. I really suffered intensely in the first 10 years of my life. I would cry at the concept of burning in hell, or the concept of purgatory and original sin.
Mexican Catholicism is very, very brutal and very, very gory. That all affected me.”
Mama, his latest producorial effort, is a spooky tale of two abandoned girls raised by a supernatural nanny. Del Toro came to the story after seeing a three-minute short film by director Andrés Muschietti.
“The short is brilliant,” he says. “Atmospheric and creepy. You can see a storytelling will. You can see a voice. There is a filmmaker in that short.
“Very often you see shorts that are glossy but have very little to say. Or they’re really intense and interesting but they are badly done. But this short had the perfect balance of form, function and story.”
Muschietti is just the latest director to be discovered and mentored by Del Toro, who himself was given a helping hand by people like James Cameron.
“I’ve been very, very blessed by finding good people who believed in me at the right time. Obviously I try and pay it forward. Right now I’m 48-years-old and have been doing this for 30-something years, 20 directing. I’ve been able to produce close to 20 movies between Mexico and America and Spain and I would say in 99 per cent of the cases it has been really, really beautiful. A couple of cases it has been hard or the movie has been disappointing but Mama is one of the good ones I am really proud of.”
Guillermo del Toro may be the world’s cuddliest boogeyman. When I enter the hotel room to interview the 47-year-old producer of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, he stands up and hugs me. Not exactly what you anticipate from a master of horror.
But then again, surprises are his stock in trade. From the eerie Pale Man character in Pan’s Labyrinth to the deadly mechanical scarab of Cronos, he has trained viewers to expect the unexpected from his films.
A career spent scaring the pants off people has given the director some insight on why we like to be terrified at the movies.
“We try to look for the extraordinary in our ordinary lives,” he says. “That’s just the normal way we behave as spiritual beings. And horror movies allow us to live extraordinary experiences without having to go through extraordinary risk.
“I have a harder time understanding reality shows than I have a hard time understanding genre films. Because genre films give you something you don’t get in real life. Reality shows give you people you would normally never talk to in real life. Why are you interested in watching them?”
Not that the self described workaholic has much time to watch reality TV. When he’s not executive producing Oscar-nominated movies like Biutiful he’s writing the much anticipated The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, or working on a new novel with his co-writer Chuck Hogan. Add to that the alien attack movie Pacific Rim which he’ll spend the next year filming in Toronto and you have one of the busiest men in the business.
“Hard work is pleasure for me,” he says, adding that luckily, “I have been surrounded by a system of enabling family and I submerge myself in my work.”
A horror fan since childhood, (“I read Salem’s Lot in one sitting,” he says. “Eleven hours from eight a.m. to seven p.m. outside in the pool. I had a second degree burn because of that!”), he has s simple criteria for the projects he accepts.
“You should only get involved in things you love irrationally,” he says. “I turn down very lucrative things. I do constantly and I’ve done it all my career. But I go with the things I believe in and I think, so far, everything you see that I’ve put out feels like part of that universe.”
Del Toro on his movie’s monsters:
“The scariest thing about these creatures in the movie is that they are intelligent. They strategize. They literally find ways to get the upper hand against the humans.”
For someone who grew up watching Godzilla stomp his way through the major cities of the world, the idea of a sea monster large enough to use a battleship as a baseball bat is very exciting.
In Pacific Rim director Guillermo Del Toro presents the biggest movie monsters seen since the Blue Oyster Cult sang, “Oh no, there goes Tokyo, go go Godzilla!”
Pacific Rim’s monsters are direct descendants of the “kaiju” or strange beasts that became popular in the sci fi films produced by the Japanese company Toho in the 1950s and 60s. Most famous is the King of All Monsters, Godzilla—he even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—the giant lizard who wreaked havoc in twenty-nine movies.
Rounding out Toho’s Big Five are a “Divine Moth” called Mothra, and a trio of kaiju named King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, and Rodan.
The first Godzilla film came in 1954. The story of an ancient dinosaur-like colossus created by American nuclear weapons testing, was inspired by a news story about the Lucky Dragon 5, a Japanese fishing boat contaminated after sailing too close to a U.S. nuclear test.
“Suitmation actor” Haruo Nakajima played the beast and could only walk thirty feet at a stretch in the 200-pound Godzilla suit. To create the monster’s fearful roars a audio engineers threw reverb on the sound of a resin-coated leather glove rubbed on the strings of a double bass.
Ten years after that movie King Ghidorah, a fearsome alien dragon, was created as Godzilla’s archenemy. In the script he is described as having “three heads, two tails, and a voice like a bell,” who travels to our planet in a magnetic meteorite. Equipped with nuclear fire breath, in the 1964 film Ghidorah The Three Headed Monster he devastates Japan until repelled by Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra.
The following decade Mechagodzilla, Godzilla’s mechanical doppelgänger, was introduced in a movie originally called Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster but was changed when the copyright holders for The Bionic Woman threatened to sue. Retitled Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster, it’s the first movie in the series to feature a laser “eye” beam.
Rodan, the 1956 kaiju movie about mutant pterosaurs and prehistoric insects who terrorize humanity, has two significant firsts. It was the first Japanese monster movie to be filmed in color, and, according to George Takei’s autobiography, was his debut as a professional actor.
