Recently, I was browsing through Netflix, searching for a horror film that looked somewhat decent. Before long, I stumbled upon ‘Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark’, a remake of a 1973 film of the same name, which I haven’t seen. I settled on this film because I’d heard several good things about it from various people and figured that it couldn’t be that bad.

And, to be fair, it wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty good, for the most part. It does, however, suffer from one massive, crippling flaw: It’s not scary… at all. Like, not even a little. And that’s a shame, because the rest of the film is quite good. The plot (mostly) makes sense, the acting is decent all around, and it’s quite well shot.

The film follows a young girl who is sent to live with her father and his girlfriend in an old mansion that they inherited. Soon, she discovers a large group of creatures living in the basement, locked behind an iron grate. They offer to befriend her if she releases them, and quickly turn on her and her family when she does. See, these creatures have always lived in the basement, and they feed on the teeth of young children. The former owner of the mansion used to feed them, but they killed him after he ran out of children, so they were all locked behind the grate, never to kill again. This is shown in the opening scene, before the credits; and I must say that it is the only scary part in the entire film.

The reason why it’s scary is that the creatures aren’t actually shown, allowing us to use our own imagination to fill in what they might look like. And I can guarantee that the image everyone had of them is infinitely more scary than what they actually look like. Because, after the child releases them they get a lot of screen time, and they are the least threatening things on the face of the planet. This is the reason why the film isn’t scary; the creatures are basically just semi-humanoid rats. If the filmmakers wanted to show them to us so badly, then they should have made damn sure that they were actually scary, instead of cute in a weird way!

As a result of this, regardless of the quality of the rest of the film, it gets very boring very fast. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re watching this thing to get scared, and it does not deliver the goods at all.

I can’t say that I recommend this film, but it’s not a complete waste of time, I guess. It’s just very forgettable.