Habitantes de la obscuridad

THEY are our childhood fears haunting our adult lives. THEY shun the light, living only in shadow. THEY've marked their victims as children, returning years later to claim them.

One big complaint about this movie is the darkness. No, not the atmosphere, the actual darkness that makes many scenes difficult to see. Sorry, squinting won't help.

RECOMENDATION TO VIEWERS: Watch this movie in a dark room with the video brightness set at 100%. Then, you might be able to make out what's happening, especially in the scenes containing the monsters. Having watched it this way, it was more visible and enjoyable. However, you may need sunglasses for the brighter sequences...

Having suffered from night terrors since age 3, that progressed to night terrors with sleep walking by 5, I was thoroughly creeped out by the story line and since I still have night terrors on a regular basis I thought the idea that your marked was very interesting and a scary thought. Decent horror flick, not a blood fest, but the kind of movie that gives you the willies, especially if your afraid of the dark and suffer from night terrors. Worth a watch! ;)

Nineteen years ago, young Billy Parks was taken by a mysterious force in his bedroom. In the present, Julia Lund (Laura Regan) is working towards her masters degree in psychology. Paul Loomis (Marc Blucas) is her boyfriend. She meets childhood friend Billy who claims that they were marked as children and warns her about the dark. He then shoots himself in front of her.

This thing is devastatingly slow. There is no tension whatsoever. The story is stripped down to basically nothing. It doesn't maintain any creepiness. As a horror, there is nothing to be afraid of in this. The jump scares are really telegraphed. Laura Regan screams but that's all. The "Wes Craven presents" is the first warning. Essentially, it means that Wes collected a paycheck but otherwise has little to do with the filmmaking.

I rented this movie last night with a friend of mine because I had heard it was sooooooo awful on this website and wanted a bad movie to laugh at.

I was suprised to find out it is actually a decent horror movie. People who say this is one of the worst movies ever must have only seen 5 movies in their whole lives and they all must have been in the top ten here at the imdb.

I do have a couple of problems with it.

1)The CGI monsters are very fake looking in a few scenes, this really detracts from suspense.

2)They show too much of the monsters too early on in the movie. They should have watched The Others where suspense was created by not showing The Others till the very end.

Other then that I thought this was a decent horror movie, what else do people expect out of a horror flick then this? It was kinda creepy and interesting to watch the people die, the plot was decent involving the whole psychology aspect. People who think this is one of the worst movies ever need to watch Fear Dot Com or any of the Freddy/Jason movies after number 3 or so.

7 / 10

This film has it's good and bad sides. There's a lot of potential and beautiful scenes in this movie. I don't know how they managed to find that country scene with mists, the moon, a country road and everything just perfect!

It also succeeds in scaring the viewer quite a few times with startling attacks and creepy camera work. I would even have liked to see more of this, but true, it might become repetitive, and we know how how we hate repetitive stuff in the world of the short attention span! Also sound is used to scare, like the telephone ringing in the 'Exorcist', at a tense moment.

It also slightly over uses the "monster coming to get the camera" scene, where a scary monster comes at the camera (/viewer). These are good methods of scaring people.

There are some terrible logic errors and they do spoil the film for 'thinking' people. If it was a real scenario her boyfriend, for example, wouldn't let her out of his sight! Much of the plot relies on the people isolating themselves from others for anything to take place. The strange thing is, even though they know they are in danger, they still go off on their own, where no one is there to help them. Whenever there are people present, nothing happens.

This flaw ruined the film a bit for me. I kept thinking "why is she doing THAT", when nothing would happen if she did THIS. Very frustrating... but I guess they were out to make a movie about people being attacked when they were alone, and this is what they ended up with. (The British "Lenny Henry Show" did a great parody of this kind of movie, with the actors always saying: "We've got to split up, it's more likely we get chopped up that way!" and "oh-oh, the music's changed, that must mean - here comes the bad guy!")

Also, without spoiling anything, there are some places where people just seem to willingly ignore the facts. Like when a window is broken -inwards-, into a closed chamber. No one even noticed that, and one is left asking - and then what? Just another missing person from a locked room? How many of these can there be? Where are the paranormal investigators when you need them? Where are the university geeks want to become the "ghost busters"? They investigated stuff like this in "The Entity" and that was supposed to be based on a true story.

Coming back to the positive side, I can imagine the actress playing the main part was chosen because she bears a striking resemblance to a young Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby". Those types are always believable when scared to death. One seems to identify with a skinny (almost anorexic (was that possibly the comment they were making with her vomiting in the railways station?) sweet young thing. Her boyfriend is far too conservative for his own good. Letting her sleep alone in a double bed! What kind of gentleman is that, in this day and age! Just think: If her impotent shrink had been played by Bruce Willis he'd have followed up on her story and we'd have seen some aliens splattered all over the subway! - Now that'd been juicy! Sorry wrong film. That's "Mimic".

"They" is one of these movies that end up being rather annoying the more you see it. From all sides... and I agree there was a LOT of potential in there. Just not quite enough attention to detail.

Still: *** /5