Habitantes da Escuridão

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.

Well-crafted thriller that plays upon night terrors and the old "monster in the closet" legend. An ambitious, sensible young psychology student is occasionally frightened by memories of old childhood nightmares. She, along with a group of strangers, eventually come together believing they were all traumatized and "tagged" as children by mysterious night demons, the very same demons who may be returning to complete some ominous, unfinished business. Occasionally spooky thriller holds your interest the way it should, but it never really tops its effective opening sequence, or gets informative enough to be really satisfying. **

An excellent little horror-movie. It probably did not too well at the box office (not even with the "Wes Craven Presents" attachment), but this is worthy to check out. Don't expect stupid, obnoxious teenagers who can't act in the leadroles, don't wait for silly, embarrassing one-liners, don't relay on cheap CGI (not even on expensive CGI, for that matter). What we get is a tense horrorthriller, well acted throughout by a cast of fairly unknowns, which relays on atmosphere, minimal special effects and leaving a lot to the imagination of the audience (which, as most of true horror-fans know, can't be beaten by the most expensive and amazing FX). To my opinion, great horrorfilms are those which are taken seriously, by the creators, the actors, by everyone involved. Take a look at Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist(1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Halloween (1979), The Thing (1982) etc. (to name only a few of 60ties, 70ties and 80ties horror classics). What they have in common is seriousness. They might contain some humour, but it never takes over the movies to a degree that the audience is allowed to lean back in their seats and grab a next handful of popcorn in anticipation of the next shocking sequence... What these movies are capable of is to keep the audience at the edge of their seats, to scare the audience into believing and fearing what its sees and not sees but make believe seeing it) and to make the audience go home afterwards with a feeling of unease. That is what THIS movie does very well: make the audience uneasy, because it deals with a primal fear: darkness and what may be IN the darkness. Its a little gem, and i think it will be considered as a "classic" in years to come.

While preparing for the examination of her Master Degree in Psychology, Julia Lund (Laura Regan) is called by her friend from childhood Billy Parks (Jo Abrahams) to meet him in a bar. They both had nightmares when they were children, and Billy is totally disturbed with demons from the dark that would be chasing him and commits suicide in front of Julia. The traumatic experience, plus the meeting with two friends of Billy, Sam Burnside (Ethan Embry) and his girlfriend Terry Alba (Dagmara Dominczyk), in the funeral make Julia having nightmares again. When Sam tells her that they four have been tagged in their childhood, and demons are coming to get them to the darkness, Julia becomes afraid of the dark and asks for help to her boyfriend Paul Loomis (Marc Blucas).

"They" is a promising good movie that fails in the conclusion, which is not satisfactory. This movie is not totally bad, but I prefer "Fear of the Dark" (2002), which explores the same theme using the psychological factor of the common fear of the dark that children might have. The option in "They" of making the demons real, with reasonable special effects, is sillier, unexplained and not so scary. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Habitantes da Escuridão" ("Inhabitants of the Darkness")

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