Movie Reviews

31 Days of Halloween: Darkness Falls

A definite misfire.

October 20, 2021

Welcome to another installment of 31 Days of Halloween! This is our chance to set the mood for the spookiest and scariest month of the year as we focus our attention on horror and Halloween fun. For the month of October we’ll be sharing various pieces of underappreciated scary books, comics, movies, and television to help keep you terrified and entertained all the way up to Halloween.

My oh my it’s difficult to know where to begin with the innumerable problems that plague this lackluster horror film. Darkness Falls wants to be a cool fun supernatural horror but all it ends up being is a shoddy embarrassing mess. The story and character development is minimal and the performances are only okay. But the issue that is, to me, even more egregious than either of those is the fact that the direction is inexcusably sloppy. I can’t recall a film that’s this sloppy in its camerawork. There simply isn’t anything here to really enjoy.

It really is surprising how incompetent the direction is. This kind of “direction” really sucks the entertainment factor out of the events happening onscreen. What goes on during Darkness Falls isn’t particularly interesting anyway, but the way it’s all filmed shoots down any chance of it being interesting or thrilling. Seeing a film like this really gives you a newfound appreciation of what quality direction looks like. It’s hard for me to buy that they looked over this at the end and thought it was passable but I guess they did.

I struggled to keep watching this due to its jumbled frenzy nature. The action is all so jumpy and messy, it becomes dizzying. There’s also nothing all that frightening or fascinating to actually look at. The few shots that are clear just aren’t terribly interesting. There’s only a few moments (mostly at the beginning) where I felt the witch came off as a scary force to be reckoned with. The scariest thing about her is the noise she makes but that’s mostly drowned out due to all the jumpy chaos that ensues. Visuals aside, the script doesn’t do very much at all to amp up scares. The scenes where people are in danger are just very generic and are largely ineffective.

The actual story that’s told is very by the numbers and dull. There’s just nothing to really sink your teeth into. I kept waiting for the plot to introduce something to spice things up, but unfortunately that never came. I can deal with some predictability as long as it’s still entertaining but gosh this feels like a chore to get through. The actual concept in and of itself is not a bad one but the handling is just so lazy.

The characters are as bland as the story. They seem like nice decent folks, but the script just doesn’t make us care about them. You need to care about your main characters, especially in a horror film. The main character Kyle is sweet and I liked him fine but I would’ve liked some more development other than just he’s a nice guy with a screwed up past.

But that marginal character development is right in line with this film’s overall style. It’s like “why have a good story with interesting characters when we can just throw a whole bunch of bland jumpy visuals at the camera”. The actual performances are not bad but the cast is really just hung out to dry. They aren’t given the proper material to really flex their acting muscles which is unfortunate because I think they’re all capable of good work but here they’re buried under all this crap.

I love horror stories such as this one but my goodness get a decent script and learn where to put the damn camera! Cross this one off your Halloween watch list! Darkness Falls is a definite misfire. The story is dull, there’s not much to the characters, and the direction is sloppy as hell.