Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Director – John Newland

Writer – Nigel McKeand

1973 - USA

Stars – Kim Darby, Jim Hutton, Barbara Anderson

 

From the opening musical sting and the freeze-frame black cat credits, you know you’re in the Seventies. This is the TV movie whose legend has persisted through a certain generation as a minor classic. A kindertrauma of renown; indeed, “one of the scariest made-for-TV horror filmsof the 20th century.” (I’ll reserve the accolade for “the most” to ‘Salem’sLot’.) And this datedness is part of the appeal, from the casting and acting and set design, etc.

 

Kim Darby gives a somewhat underwhelming performance as the housewife who’s starting to feel second place to her husband’s ambition. Typically, she’ll go shopping with friends and gripe about their husbands. However, Darby’s lethargy does convey a neglected woman whose discontent manifests as homunculi in the sealed-up chimney she insists upon opening, whispering her name. There’s lots of comic book colouring amongst the shadows – greens and purples – sinister muttering, some male condescension, and the little creatures come across as predecessors for ‘The Gate’. The monsters are like malevolent pranksters whose stony visages have their own ability to inscribe on the imagination in a way that more realistic creatures couldn’t. And they have that “something in the house is out to get me” vibe that, admittedly, is abetted by the characters’ inefficiency with light switches.

 

It has a lot of retro-appeal, a little Seventies Gothicism and spookiness and a surprisingly downbeat ending in that the discontent ultimately triumphs, despite her husband realising too late that he needs to pay attention. In this way, like ‘Something Evil’, it’s a creepy minor and memorable horror about supernatural manifestations of a woman’s unhappy stagnation in a traditional second fiddle housewife role. And therefore a little more subversive than its TV movie context and simple surface scares might imply.