The Fear of Darkness

Skye Williams (Penelope Mitchell) is found cowering in a corner. Her boyfriend is missing. Dr. Sarah Faithfull (Maeve Dermody) is brought in to investigate. Skye is haunted by her ordeal and the after-effects of a powerful drug with which the couple had been experimenting. She is deadly afraid of the dark and an imaginary figure.

This is a psychological horror with a few atmospheric scares. There is not enough and it needs to make more sense. I can see at least two possible route for the premise. One is a body switch premise. The other is multiple personality premise. Neither actually works with the construction of this movie. I think they're going for an alternate dimensional evil which doesn't connect with the ending at all. This is a small Australian horror with two beautiful ladies. This has a couple of familiar moves but ultimately ends with a faltering landing. I'm looking through filmmaker Christopher Fitchett's credits. He seems to have made a few movies in the 80's and then worked on other people's shorts in the 2000's. I don't have much expectations for his future work.

This film is all "blah blah blah" and nothing happens. The script is dreadful and you can really see they had trouble working out how to end it all with a tedious little twist that you saw coming a mile away. There were just too many scenes were people were talking at each other for what was 10 minutes every scene with a couple of little "frights" (and I do mean LITTLE) in between. By half way through I got bored and started fast forwarding all the walking bits because if people were;t talking they were walking and it all seemed so padded out. The acting was pretty average and even Aaron Pederson who is usually pretty good felt like he'd just walked onto the set and didn't know what film he was in. Honestly, it's all a bit of a dog's breakfast. EXCEPT, the one thing that is actually very good is the cinematography, so obviously they paid someone good to do that. Overall, it's just a pretty looking borefest.

Another propaganda film about the dangers of "drugs", designed to inspire fear even to touch psychedelic drugs. It would be nice to label propaganda films somehow, so as not to waste time on them.

Okay to start, -1 Star just for this name. It's just horrifying.

There wasn't very much to the buildup the first 2/3 of the movie. Nothing really good about it. Nothing really bad about it.

And the payoff....Horribly bad. Will leave you feeling like....why did I waste my time.

-1 Star for the Ending.

Easily one of the best looking horror movies I've seen. And it doesn't resort to computer generated images much. It's the lights and the colors that get most of the job done here. "The Fear of Darkness" doesn't sound bad either. Both the sound effects and the music, where the movie uses them, are just fine. Not as impressive as the visuals, but still strong. Not a problem. What is a problem, however, is the content of this package. It may slightly remind you of Mike Flanagan's "Oculus" from 2013 with how what's really happening and what is only happening in somebody's head are sometimes hard to tell from one another. Only that movie had more scares. And it had a much clearer ending. One that wasn't confusing and anticlimactic. Also, with what sets the plot in motion here, Travis Z's "The Midnight Man" from 2016 could have been a prequel to this movie. But again, having certain things remain a mystery didn't prevent that movie from telling you a clear story, and an uncompromising one. Christopher Fitchett's "The Fear of Darkness" here looks very good and sounds good, but as for the story told, it is good at setting things up, exploring things, leading the viewer up to things, but when it's time for set ups to pay off and conclusions to be arrived at, there can be disappointment. And that prevents the plot of the film from reaching high enough.