30 Second Bottom Line: A hundred-year-old ghost terrorizes a small town in Maine, as a campfire story comes to life.
Story Line: In the town of Darkness Falls, Maine, over 150 years ago, there lived a gentle little old lady who would give the town's children a gold coin whenever the last of their baby teeth came out; they called her the "Tooth Fairy." The old lady's house burned & she was severely burned along with it. She survived, but the damage to her skin left it so sensitive to light & the damage was so severe that she had to wear a porcelain mask. She even had to cloak herself from head to toe to go out at night.
One day, two little children from the town came up missing and the townspeople blamed the tooth fairy & hanged her. With her last breath she uttered a curse upon the town. The following day the children were found, the townsfolk buried the tooth fairy's body in shame - but while the body was gone, the curse remained. The tooth fairy still made it a point to visit children after the last of their baby teeth came out, only now she didn't have golden coins for them. If her tortured spirit came calling, & you saw her masked face, it was probably the last thing you ever saw. That is unless you're Kyle Walsh, who when he was 12 years old saw the old lady, face to mask, & lived to tell the tale. His mother on the other hand was not so lucky.
Naturally, telling people your mother was killed by the tooth fairy won't get you sympathy, it will however get you institutionalized and heavily medicated, with a severe aversion to darkness. Once released, Kyle Walsh got out of Darkness Falls & found his way to Las Vegas. Can you think of a better place to live if you're afraid of the dark than Vegas? Good touch.
Ten years after his mother's death, which is where we join the story, Kyle Walsh comes back to town to help the younger brother of a childhood friend who also has the misfortune of having seen the tooth fairy & lived to tell about it.
Tell Me More About It: I have come to grips with the sad fact that I am fairly desensitized to violence. I'm not too proud of it, but it is my reality, it's probably the reality for a lot of people in today's society. "Darkness Falls did show me (& just about everyone else in attendance at the screening) that you can still jump & maybe even let out a little scream at a movie. Since violence doesn't work on people much these days, this movie went kind of Hitchcock on us & didn't try to gross us out, but just plain scare us. The filmmakers use every sense available to achieve that. The music would crest, dart & fall, all at the right moments, to create the desired effect. With light & dark being key elements in the movie, these were used to full advantage as well; fading light on & off skin, eclipsing light at a slow pace to build tension. Instead of seeing someone getting slashed to bits, we see the gothic dark figure in the emotionless pale mask swoop out of nowhere to claim its victim, then disappear just as suddenly with their panicking prey in its grasp. This isn't a three-star movie because of a superior performance, or even the script. This is a three-star movie, to me, because of what I saw it accomplish - girlfriends squeezing their boyfriends' knees, cynical teenagers rooting for the good-guy, & people making it a note to avoid dark spots in the parking lot after the movie. Overall an enjoyable cinematic experience.
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