User Reviews

I found this somewhat randomly when scrolling through movies this evening. I thought the description was cool, so I went for it. I watched it on Disney+, but going by earlier reviews, it was made by Lifetime.

The film starts on Halloween 1957. Three kids approach this house, and two dare each other to ring the bell. Once they go inside, something bad happens. Cut to the modern day.

It's an okay lead-in, but we basically get dropped into the midst Kelly and Brian's marriage discord. The first scene with them involves their neighbors dropping off a pie. Sounds innocent enough, but Brian has a moment of hallucination about his female neighbor. Their marriage has apparently been in tumult for a while because we see them in a counselor's office discussing their problems. In fact, there is never a time where they seem happy - or believable - as a couple. Every time Kelly tries to be romantic, he blows her off and then complains that she doesn't understand him. He is also fanatically jealous. In short, Brian is a jerk.

I think the issues surrounding the Brian character speak to larger issues with the casting; it simply doesn't fit. Not only do Kelly and Brian not have any spark, but Sarah doesn't seem like their kid. I do think that Fletcher (Kelly) and Sohn (Sarah) are decent actors, and their performances help carry things along well enough.

Toward the end, Sarah goes missing - something that happens earlier, too. Only this time, Kelly calls the police immediately. There is no explanation why she chose to do that, so it's odd. Somehow, one of the officers realizes that Sarah is trapped behind a wall - again, with no explanation. Those logic gaps are weird and bring the film down.

The end is also anticlimactic. There is a tense setup as Brian has finally snapped and put Sarah in danger, leading to her calling Kelly for help. Kelly races home and confronts Brian, then he locks her in the garage. She busts her way out and finds the house is engulfed in flames (*cough* bad CGI). Then she turns around to find Sarah standing there. That's it. Brian, she later figures, set himself on fire in the house in order to destroy the demon.

The other odd part of it is that Kelly simply drives away with Sarah. You'd think the police would question her or something. But wait! She does get interrogated by an officer in a rather nonsensical face-off sometime later, and the officer accuses her of setting the fire to get Brian's life insurance payout, but nothing comes of it.

The next cut is to the property with a newly built home and a new family. The new husband and wife are, of course, unaware of the property's past and their goth daughter is the only one to sense something. The end.

I do give the creators credit for making some creepy moments when the ghosts materialize. The child ghosts and a shadow man are interesting. There are also some tense moments as Sarah interacts with the dark spirits.

On the other hand, the lack of cohesion in the cast, the logic gaps, and the weak ending pull the whole operation down. I've seen far worse horror flicks, but this one is a one-and-done.

I don't know why, but the SyFy Channel runs very few haunted house movies while Lifetime occasionally runs these family dramas with vague paranormal ingredients and calls them horror thrillers. It doesn't really work. The ghosts aren't scary, and the drama is often unbelievably cookie-cutter routine. Probably based on the events that inspired "The Conjuring," "House of Darkness" is about a family that relocates to a remote house with paranormal activity. The parents have the anxiety of Jack and Wendy Torrance from "The Shining," and the daughter is a loose clone of Carol Ann from "Poltergeist," but the scares are nowhere close to "The Amityville Horror." There are a few shots of the local neighbors looking over nervously to suggest there's something wrong with the house, but these foreshadowing elements don't work because the house looks more like a small motel than a haunted house. One of the more ridiculous plot elements is the fact that the couple is keeping up with their marriage counselor in short video diaries that they keep making through the movie. What consists of the hauntings are the wife seeing signs of children in old Halloween episodes she thinks is her daughter, and the daughter and her cousin experimenting with toys rolling by themselves across the house. The father sees a few things happen, but his situation is not to believe in what's happening and instead lose his mind much like Jack Torrance in "The Shining." It's not really scary, nor is there anything done that truly creative. Almost everything in this movie from the psychic attacked by flies to the daughter who turns up in a sealed up room has already been done in other more successful horror movies. This is what happens when one tries to turn a familial drama into a horror movie without having a real understanding of how horror movies work. There's just nothing to really pull the audience in. The activity isn't scary, the plot is slow, the characters are boring and the script drags on uninterestingly as the viewer waits for something to happen. Even the attempt for a twist ending is left vague, not that the effort really matters by now. I give it 2 out of 5.

Allegedly inspired by true events, "House of Darkness" played like a set of clichés from the haunted house-horror film genres.

Brian (a carpenter) and Kelly (a massage therapist) are having marital difficulties. A therapist recommends that they each video record their feelings. The pacing of the film drags with the intermittent videos of the couple venting their thoughts about the other.

Brian and Kelly move from San Francisco to the country along with their little girl Sarah. The purchase a house at the corner of Church and Ballard with a disturbing record of fatalities, but were not apprised of this background from the realtor.

Brian apparently succumbs to the dark side while Kelly retains her senses and wants to take little Sarah away from the danger zone. It was difficult to understand why Brian would constantly leave Kelly and Sarah and retreat to his garage. Kelly was correct in suggesting that Brian was "the most selfish man in the world."

The film genuinely collapses at the end with an obligatory visit to a prison where Sarah meets the poor resident Ruth Wallace who succumbed to the dark side and murdered her children. Apparently, the house will remain haunted even after it burns to the ground and is rebuilt.

The film's denouement failed to tie up the loose ends on whether Kelly will face legal difficulties related to Brian's death. And, by the way, what ever happened to the poor psychic who suffered an attack of bees while sitting in her car?

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!