Peur(s) du noir

After seeing Fear(s) of The Dark I think I can safely say I was as, or more, affected than I have ever been after watching a film. Not since the horrific denouement of Haneke's original Funny Games do I think I have even come close to being as physically shook up as I was after seeing this film. A collaboration between six graphic artists and animators, I suppose if it must be distilled into the crudest possible collision of reference points it could be summarised as Stephen King meets Waking Life (Richard Linklater's 2001 film composed of rotoscope animation vignettes) yet that doesn't come anywhere close.

The artists who have visualised nightmares for this project are Philadelphia native Charles Burns, ubiquitous to graphic novel fans due to his masterly disturbing book Black Hole; former Liquid Liquid bassist Richard McGuire; Belgian resident Marie Caillou; Christian Hinckler (better known by his pseudonym Blutch), and Italian Lorenzo Mattotti. Interspersing these animated tales are kaleidoscopic dancing patterns which are, through their hypnotic abstractions, perhaps the most visually mesmerising sequences in the whole film. These patterns are set to the vacuous middle-class fears and worries of a bourgeois woman, and the insubstantiality of her worries sets a theme which extends throughout the film. None of the fears represented in any of the narrative threads are viable. They are all tales of terror which one wouldn't have been surprised to find lurking in a battered Goosebumps paperback in the late nineties. This doesn't matter, though, because the film's power lies in its incredibly paced orchestrations of image and sound.

After a joyously Gothic title sequence in which the film's name flashes on the screen at least five times (in a barrage of words reminiscent of Godard at his most poetically despotic) we are presented with an introduction to Blutch's storyline, which extends throughout the film. A hellish figure dressed in the clothes of a 18th century dandy roams a barren landscape with a pack of ferocious canines, hunting down unsuspecting victims and then proceeding to violently rip them apart (the last of which is a remarkably gory sequence). Ironically, considering the content of these scenes, Blutch's animation style is most reminiscent of either Raymond Briggs (In the constant shimmering of his charcoal textures) or the Walt Disney studios house style (In the fluidity of his characters' movements).

Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti present two sequences which are most reminiscent of scary bed-time stories, both being narrated in first-person. Visually, though, they couldn't be more different. Charles Burns' is, as you might imagine, the most like a moving graphic novel. The art is unmistakeably his, very clean-cut black lines without any grey, and the pictures tell the story of a conscientious student who embarks on a love affair with a girl which descends into an insectoid hell in a methodical, coherent style. Mattotti, on the other hand, tells the story of an eerie beast terrorising a small pastoral community in a free-and-easy sketchy style, with images that swim in and out of view like a dream.

This is not the best representation of a bad dream within the film, though. That accolade goes to Marie Caillou, who presents to us an Oriental phantasm. A macabre inversion of a Studio Ghibli fantasy which gets more surreal as it proceeds, a young girl is tormented by dangers both real and imaginary. Not since The Mystery Man talked to Bill Pullman at the party in Lost Highway has a nightmare been so well orated on screen and it had a large majority of the audience locked in a collective terror.

While Caillou's segment had an undeniable effect on the viewers, the last sequence, by Richard McGuire, is perhaps the most powerful of them all. Employing nothing but block black-and-white shapes to tell the story of a man who is haunted in a house by a mysterious woman, for the most part of his segment he eschews all non-diegetic music. The audience is thereby made extremely sensitive to every single movement made by the objects on screen and so the slightest motion, such as a hat-box dropping to the floor, causes the heart to skip a beat.

Peur(s) du Noir is essentially 5 short black and white animations interspersed by segments of a woman droning on about her fears, illustrated with interesting animated black and white shapes (I should note, I watched the film in French, and as my French is not perfect, I did not catch everything she said, but got the general impression that she was your typical anxious overachieving yuppie).

The five shorts all used different animation techniques, but were overall pleasingly creepy. There was a cruel aristocrat and his dogs, an Italian village ravaged by a mysterious beast, a budding scientist and his insect specimens, a Japanese girl bullied by classmates/ghosts, and a refugee from a snowstorm shacked up in a Victorian house. This final short was, I thought, the most effective. It was done in pure black and white, and the only light shed in the house (with wonderfully Goreyesque wallpaper) came from a candle the traveller carried with him in his explorations. This allowed for some great reveal moments, and additionally built up the tension extremely well.

Overall, a must see for fans of art-house animation. If it comes to a cinema near you, take the opportunity to see it, because I suspect it will be difficult to find on DVD.

Peur(s) Du Noir (Fear(s) Of The Dark) is an anthology of short animated horror films, from a series of directors, in a variety of different styles.

Some are broken up, and act as transitions, while others are more episodic in nature.

But most are in black and white...and revolve around the themes of dreams vs reality and the torture of nightmares.

In the first main story, a curious introvert finds an oddly humanoid looking insect, that he takes home to study.

However, it escapes...and disappears.

He eventually goes off to college, and it seems to have tagged along with him.

Because, when he gets a girlfriend...she wakes up with an odd gash on her arm.

As her personality starts to change...it becomes evident the creature has infiltrated her body.

She becomes more and more masculine...and much more dominant.

And soon enough...he's become the experiment...

The second film, takes place in Japan.

A young girl immigrates to a new town, and a new school, where she is systematically bullied by a group of her cruel classmates.

They subject her to all manner of tortures, both mental and physical...until she goes mad.

Or, is the truth, really, that she is being tortured in an asylum, by a cruel doctor, who manipulates her dreams into nightmares?

Either way...these experiences become her reality.

And it all ends in suicide...or, is it murder...?

In the third film, we watch as a boy from the great plains witnesses a series of attacks and disappearances from the sidelines.

His best friend provides the narration, until he too disappears.

But was he the next victim, or the culprit all along?

Some dark actor in the guise of a human child?

In the end, a witch hunt leads to the death of an alligator...and it becomes venerated, like a saint...to keep the evil away...

The fourth, and final, episode has us following a man (who looks Russian) as he comes home to a dark house, only to get drunk and pass out, while reading a book.

His recent experiences are reiterated in his onsetting dreamstate, where he watches a lost love slice his neck from behind...as if he were an apparition, witnessing his own death.

When he awakens, he burns the book and photograph that haunt his dreams.

But he can't escape his own thoughts.

So he investigates the house further, to check if there is an ominous ne'er-do-well lying in wait to kill him as he sleeps.

Now, his paranoia is getting the best of him in the form of pareidolia.

And it becomes obvious that he is the greatest danger to himself.

The transitionary shorts include a film about an evil old miser who is walking a pack of vicious dogs, which he let's loose to torture unsuspecting townsfolk; and an abstract film about what happens when you let your fears and anxieties take hold of your identity.

I quite enjoyed this, as the animation styles are diverse and all around excellent.

With some great storytelling to boot.

7 out of 10.

The story begins with what appears to be an old, sadistic British general walking a pack of angry dogs. A dog gets away and chases a small boy... thus beings one of a few stories of people's fears. The fears displayed in these animated segments usually involve an insect or animal beast. I think that the director either had a fascination or fear of bugs/animals.

In between each segment, a soothing french voice tells us her "fears" but what I interpret as her observations and cristicms of society and social behaviors.

One segment, a man is haunted by a praying mantis; in another, a girl is possessed by the ghost of a samuarai, in another.. a man has an encounter with the ghosts of an abandoned house.

Each segment has a unique art style where people's bizarre fears become their lives. A great artistic representation of how people's fears can so easily become part of their reality - whether those fears are overcome or succombed to.

This compilation of short animated films in one movie begins with the narrator stating their deepest fears from a various places. Shot mostly in black and white with animation, the film can be dark, funny, evil, and thought-provoking at times but it lacks connection to the relations with the other short films. While I enjoyed the college student's romance with a troubled college girl, I wanted to find out more. Then there is the girl afraid of the samurai in Japan. The boy whose friends and uncle go missing and a crocodile in the mix. I don't have a favorite at the moment. They all seem to be both chilling, dark, and even light at times. I do find this film interesting for the most part. The six different directors and their visions of fear taking over is quite a unique premise but there are some issues regarding translation and connecting them all together like a giant puzzle that hurts the film.