Fear(s) of the Dark (2008)

good back-story, and good acting

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The stories and the animation were mildly interesting, but it could have used some color. The awfully drab browns and grays with, occasional tinting, began to depress me after awhile.The really (and I mean REALLY) bad parts were the segments between the stories with that horrible woman squawking like a really annoying buzzard, over those idiotic moving shapes. Every time her rotten voice hit our ears everyone (all six people) in the theater groaned. Nobody cares about her stupid European elitist fears. She should be more afraid of her head and body becoming two separate entities sometime in the future than whether or not she's becoming more "right-wing".It made me want to stand up and shake my fist at the moving rectangles and scream, "Shut up you loudmouthed b---h!!" She ruined the movie.I've read what others are saying about the white subtitles, but I really I really have much trouble reading them. However that obnoxious woman made me wish I was illiterate.

The trailer to this movie was very enticing--gorgeous black and white animation, sort of in the style of "Renaissance", promising Gothic horror from famous graphic artists; in this, the movie certainly doesn't disappoint. Fans of horror, animation, or film noir will definitely get their fill of high-contrast, deep-shadowed, psychological hijinks and darkened imagination. Too bad the presentation itself kind of sucks.First of all, they cut back and forth through the different shorts, for no real good reason I think except that they didn't want it to seem like just a presentation of shorts, but wanted to make the work as a whole thread together. The barbaric Frankenstein's monster that results loses a lot of its tension and beat. There are some truly horrifying moments, and the stories themselves are engaging and fun, but for the fact that they cut back and forth between them, effectively deflating a lot of the carefully built drama.Secondly, some idiot decided for the American release to transcribe the subtitles in white lettering. Whereas white lettering works great for classics of black and white cinema wherein most of the frame is variants of GRAY, in a movie made almost entirely out of half white, half black frames, only half of the subtitles can actually be read. Thankfully I know a smattering of French and was able to basically get the gist of most of it. I cannot say as much for the rest of the people in the theatre, as indicated by their grumbling. Fire whomever planned out those subtitles; I now eagerly await a DVD that comes with an English dub so that I can get the rest of what I missed.Ironically in that vein, it turns out that the quality of the shorts included is pretty much directly proportional to the amount of dialog or voice-over narration contained. The absolute best short came at the end, and was silent except for sound effects. It used brilliant negative space to create a claustrophobic terror unmatched by the rest of the shorts. The worst short was this weird sort of rectilinear Rorschach test where this woman recites a shopping list of contemporary existential fears: "I'm afraid of being bourgeois. I'm afraid of being a democrat. I'm afraid of eating too much." YUP. Definitely will keep ME awake at night. I'm just sayin'.All in all, I feel the potential for a perfectly good cinematic experience was let down by some overthinking in editing and underthinking of actual presentation. It is redeemed mostly by the singular strengths of the shorts individually, and those moments in the movie where shadows flitted tantalizingly across the screen.--PolarisDiB

After seeing Fear(s) of The Dark I think I can safely say I was as, or more, affected than I have ever been after watching a film. Not since the horrific denouement of Haneke's original Funny Games do I think I have even come close to being as physically shook up as I was after seeing this film. A collaboration between six graphic artists and animators, I suppose if it must be distilled into the crudest possible collision of reference points it could be summarised as Stephen King meets Waking Life (Richard Linklater's 2001 film composed of rotoscope animation vignettes) yet that doesn't come anywhere close.The artists who have visualised nightmares for this project are Philadelphia native Charles Burns, ubiquitous to graphic novel fans due to his masterly disturbing book Black Hole; former Liquid Liquid bassist Richard McGuire; Belgian resident Marie Caillou; Christian Hinckler (better known by his pseudonym Blutch), and Italian Lorenzo Mattotti. Interspersing these animated tales are kaleidoscopic dancing patterns which are, through their hypnotic abstractions, perhaps the most visually mesmerising sequences in the whole film. These patterns are set to the vacuous middle-class fears and worries of a bourgeois woman, and the insubstantiality of her worries sets a theme which extends throughout the film. None of the fears represented in any of the narrative threads are viable. They are all tales of terror which one wouldn't have been surprised to find lurking in a battered Goosebumps paperback in the late nineties. This doesn't matter, though, because the film's power lies in its incredibly paced orchestrations of image and sound.After a joyously Gothic title sequence in which the film's name flashes on the screen at least five times (in a barrage of words reminiscent of Godard at his most poetically despotic) we are presented with an introduction to Blutch's storyline, which extends throughout the film. A hellish figure dressed in the clothes of a 18th century dandy roams a barren landscape with a pack of ferocious canines, hunting down unsuspecting victims and then proceeding to violently rip them apart (the last of which is a remarkably gory sequence). Ironically, considering the content of these scenes, Blutch's animation style is most reminiscent of either Raymond Briggs (In the constant shimmering of his charcoal textures) or the Walt Disney studios house style (In the fluidity of his characters' movements). Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti present two sequences which are most reminiscent of scary bed-time stories, both being narrated in first-person. Visually, though, they couldn't be more different. Charles Burns' is, as you might imagine, the most like a moving graphic novel. The art is unmistakeably his, very clean-cut black lines without any grey, and the pictures tell the story of a conscientious student who embarks on a love affair with a girl which descends into an insectoid hell in a methodical, coherent style. Mattotti, on the other hand, tells the story of an eerie beast terrorising a small pastoral community in a free-and-easy sketchy style, with images that swim in and out of view like a dream.This is not the best representation of a bad dream within the film, though. That accolade goes to Marie Caillou, who presents to us an Oriental phantasm. A macabre inversion of a Studio Ghibli fantasy which gets more surreal as it proceeds, a young girl is tormented by dangers both real and imaginary. Not since The Mystery Man talked to Bill Pullman at the party in Lost Highway has a nightmare been so well orated on screen and it had a large majority of the audience locked in a collective terror. While Caillou's segment had an undeniable effect on the viewers, the last sequence, by Richard McGuire, is perhaps the most powerful of them all. Employing nothing but block black-and-white shapes to tell the story of a man who is haunted in a house by a mysterious woman, for the most part of his segment he eschews all non-diegetic music. The audience is thereby made extremely sensitive to every single movement made by the objects on screen and so the slightest motion, such as a hat-box dropping to the floor, causes the heart to skip a beat.

Here is the producer Prima Linea Productions' summary of the film Fear(s) of the Dark/Peur(s) du noir (2007) which combines the work of eight artists:"Spiders' legs brushing against naked skin... Unexplainable noises heard at night in a dark bedroom... A big empty house where you feel a presence... A hypodermic needle getting closer and closer... A dead thing trapped in a bottle of formaldehyde... A huge growling dog, baring its teeth and staring... So many scary moments we have experienced at some point in our lives – like the craftsmen of this journey straight to the land of fear. Six of the worlds hottest graphic artists and cartoonists have breathed life into their nightmares, bleeding away colour only to retain the starkness of light and the pitch black of shadows. Their intertwined stories make up an unprecedented epic where phobias, disgust and nightmares come to life and reveal Fear at its most naked and intense..."The artists are Blutch, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Jerry Kramski, Lorenzo Mattoti, Richard McGuire, Michel Pirus, and Romain Slocombe. They are designers who have done logos, product designs, and other things besides animation. Some of the black and white drawings are gorgeous, rich, subtle, pleasing to the eye--even distractingly so. Where the images are most beautiful, the animation is most lacking.The best story is one by Charles Burns of a nerdy boy who loves insects and grows up isolated and timid as a college student. Like the sucker Koistinen in Aki Kaurismaki's 2006 film 'Lights in the Dusk,' he is then seduced by a woman who only wants to entrap and use him, only this one is far more sinister and is perhaps the descendant of a praying mantis-like bug the man lost under his bed long years ago (he still sleeps in the same bed). Combining elements of Poe and Kafka, this story, which sensibly combines story elements that don't quite fit, is genuinely creepy. The drawing is fluent but utilitarian.Caillou's story is set in Japan and concerns that standard image of Japanese helplessness and provocation to perverts, a uniformed schoolgirl. There is also a sinister doctor with a big hypodermic and the ghost of a samurai and a creature with several layers of eyes. The trouble is that this story frequently interrupts itself and never finishes.In between these are two other stories, because it is the team's aim to make their omnibus into some kind of seamless whole. First there is the animations of Blutch of the eighteenth-century man with a team of snarling dogs who attack a helpless boy. Then there is the screen of geometric games by Pierre di Sciullo, entertaining us with imagery that ranges from Saul Bass to the Russian Avant Garde, while an ironic, nagging woman (well voiced by Nicole Garcia, who has made a career of this kind of character) lists things she's "afraid of" or doesn't want to become.Otherwise, I was not very taken by the stories and at times could barely follow them. The device of intermixing two of the animations/short films with the five others is a laudable effort to achieve unity and flow, but it only makes a confusing collection more so.The language is French, though the team is multinational, including American and Italian. The film was shown at Sundance as part of a horror series. The images have a pencil look, achieved however with the latest technologies. For connoisseurs of black and white drawing in film, this is worth a look for the different styles. But as a cutting edge horror or scare movie or an accomplished series of animations, this collection seems very over-hyped.The film, shown at Sundance in January 2008 and at international festivals, debuted in Paris theaters February 18, 2008, and is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, February 29-March 9.