Fear(s) of the Dark

Peur(s) du noir / Fear(s) of the Dark A collection of 6 different, animated, black and white tales where fear is the main protagonist.

Now each tale has a different story to tell, but they all capture quite well, one of our most primal instincts. Fear. And this is delivered through some rather pleasant animation, each one in a different style and also different tone. Those, I would call them somehow modern fairy tales, are located in a different time and space continuum from one another. So you are never at the same place twice.

You should be experienced in watching independent cinema and maybe be a lover of animated movies.

These shorts make you think, make you ponder, make you actually wonder, what is it that I fear most? Not really scary but worth a watch for those who have a romantic heart. 6 out of 10 is my vote.

The story begins with what appears to be an old, sadistic British general walking a pack of angry dogs. A dog gets away and chases a small boy... thus beings one of a few stories of people's fears. The fears displayed in these animated segments usually involve an insect or animal beast. I think that the director either had a fascination or fear of bugs/animals.

In between each segment, a soothing french voice tells us her "fears" but what I interpret as her observations and cristicms of society and social behaviors.

One segment, a man is haunted by a praying mantis; in another, a girl is possessed by the ghost of a samuarai, in another.. a man has an encounter with the ghosts of an abandoned house.

Each segment has a unique art style where people's bizarre fears become their lives. A great artistic representation of how people's fears can so easily become part of their reality - whether those fears are overcome or succombed to.

It is very uneven in terms of quality with the second half being quite weak, not particularly engaging and forgettable, but the first half with the first two segments is terrific with original and authentic stories and very creepy and memorable imagery. However, Fear(s) of the Dark, although very flawed, is mostly memorable for the impressive and beautiful animation with many directors each giving his contribution with his own style ranging from hand-drawn to anime to computer animation. Its second half is weak, but it largely benefits from deft editing, great directing and wonderful animation styles making it a very interesting experience.

This compilation of short animated films in one movie begins with the narrator stating their deepest fears from a various places. Shot mostly in black and white with animation, the film can be dark, funny, evil, and thought-provoking at times but it lacks connection to the relations with the other short films. While I enjoyed the college student's romance with a troubled college girl, I wanted to find out more. Then there is the girl afraid of the samurai in Japan. The boy whose friends and uncle go missing and a crocodile in the mix. I don't have a favorite at the moment. They all seem to be both chilling, dark, and even light at times. I do find this film interesting for the most part. The six different directors and their visions of fear taking over is quite a unique premise but there are some issues regarding translation and connecting them all together like a giant puzzle that hurts the film.

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.