DARKNESS

Sometimes, an ending can completely ruin a movie. Such is the case with DARKNESS, a low budget horror movie saddled by an incoherent ending. The ending is so incoherent that the ending is one of the biggest letdowns of recent years, even for fans of modern horror movies.

The story of DARKNESS is about an American family that buys a haunted house in Spain. Forty years earlier, the house was the scene of the disappearance of six out of seven kidnapped children. The seventh child escaped, but can’t describe what happened to the other children.

Anna Paquin plays the family’s teenage daughter, Regina. Regina gets upset when her young brother, Paul, starts drawing disturbing pictures of children with their throats slit. Paul also sees ghosts of the dead children, who, he says, are bruising his body. Things get worse when their father, Mark, has a relapse of Huntington’s disease, an inherited nervous disorder that causes emotional outbursts and fits in Mark. Eventually, Regina and her boyfriend, Carlos, learn that the family members are the intended victims of a Satanic cult.

DARKNESS has some scary moments due to its style and the children’s well-defined characters, but the motives of the Satanic cult, not to mention the ghosts, are inexplicable. The movie’s ending is confusing and resolves nothing, other than the fact that, somehow, the occult forces of darkness are victorious. Ultimately, DARKNESS is a confused, abhorrent mess. The only reason the movie gets two stars instead of one is the stylish production, including the scary atmosphere and the performances by the children and Giancarlo Giannini, who plays the children’s Spanish grandfather.