I've generally avoided Lifetime's forays into ghost stories and haunted-house tales, but last night they were offering a "world premiere" of a film called "House of Darkness" and I thought I'd give it a chance. It was directed by Patrick DeLuca from a script by
well, I don't know, because I missed the opening credits and IMDb.com's page on it doesn't yet list a writer, so I don't know either who to credit for the occasional felicitous touches in the script or blame for the sillinesses and outrageous devices, including an open-ended ending of a kind that about 20 or 30 years ago would have seemed innovative but now is annoyingly clichéd. It opens with a scene on Hallowe'en in 1957, in which two trick-or-treaters approach a house in a remote rural area of northern California, get invited in, the door closes — and suddenly we hear them scream. Then the time moves up to July 2015, and the house is occupied by a young couple from San Francisco, Brian (Gunner Wright) and Kelly (Sara Fletcher). They already have a daughter, Sarah (Mykayla Sohn), but Kelly wants another child — only Brian, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, is such a workaholic he's never home long enough for the two to have sex. Brian sells her on the idea of moving to the country by telling her they'll be more alone, there will be fewer urban-related distractions and therefore more time for the "adult nights" they need to complete the sex act and conceive already. Their marriage is already on the rocks — they've been seeing a marriage therapist in San Francisco (a heavy-set avuncular African-American woman, reflecting Lifetime's tendency to cast Blacks in the roles of all-wise authority figures trying to deter the white characters from doing the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all) but they won't be able to keep seeing her once they move hundreds of miles away, so she tells them to keep video journals by talking to their computers at night and gives Brian a yellow squeeze-ball with a smiley-face on it to squeeze whenever he gets stressed. One of the big issues in their marriage is that Kelly works as a massage therapist, and Brian is ferociously jealous that she'll get hot-looking male customers, lose control completely and thereby have sex with them.
Director DeLuca gives us plenty of shots of Sarah with her eyes glaring at the camera and the other cast members, making us wonder if the unnamed writer(s) planned to pull the gimmick of having the whatsit that's haunting the house take possession of her and have her start knocking off the rest of the cast — the scenes with Sarah and her cousin Mason had elements of "The Turn of the Screw" and the later scenes with Sarah alone, casting all those burning glares, call to mind "The Bad Seed" — but at the end the gimmick turns out to be a pretty prosaic one. Through much of this movie I was counterpointing it with the old film I'd seen recently, Victor Halperin's "Supernatural" (1933), and thinking that "Supernatural" was an example of how to do a credible ghost story with a contemporary (for the time it was made) setting and "House of Darkness" was an example of how not to — that's being a little harsher on "House of Darkness" than it deserves, since at least it's well acted (especially by the leads) and much of it well staged by director DeLuca — though I could have done without the long time-lapse montages to get us from night to day where a classic-era director would have just cut from one to the other. I didn't actively dislike this movie but I didn't like it that much either!
Director DeLuca gives us plenty of shots of Sarah with her eyes glaring at the camera and the other cast members, making us wonder if the unnamed writer(s) planned to pull the gimmick of having the whatsit that's haunting the house take possession of her and have her start knocking off the rest of the cast — the scenes with Sarah and her cousin Mason had elements of "The Turn of the Screw" and the later scenes with Sarah alone, casting all those burning glares, call to mind "The Bad Seed" — but at the end the gimmick turns out to be a pretty prosaic one. Through much of this movie I was counterpointing it with the old film I'd seen recently, Victor Halperin's "Supernatural" (1933), and thinking that "Supernatural" was an example of how to do a credible ghost story with a contemporary (for the time it was made) setting and "House of Darkness" was an example of how not to — that's being a little harsher on "House of Darkness" than it deserves, since at least it's well acted (especially by the leads) and much of it well staged by director DeLuca — though I could have done without the long time-lapse montages to get us from night to day where a classic-era director would have just cut from one to the other. I didn't actively dislike this movie but I didn't like it that much either!