Fear(s) of the Dark | DVD Review

What scares you? A simple three-word question the answer to which can be as varied as the people responding to it. Whether it be as simple an answer as ‘doing my taxes’ or as seemingly irrational a reply as ‘a massive alien invasion’, everybody is afraid of something. So artistic director Etienne Robial asked six of the world’s pre-eminent comic and graphic artists – Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire, Pierre Di Sciullo, and Lorenzo Mattotti – to create black-and-white animated shorts whose subject is fear. The resulting film, Fear(s) of the Dark, available on DVD from IFC Films/MPI Home Video, intertwines their stories into an eerie anthology of sorts that in the end is hit or miss for the casual viewer, but most probably a coup of the highest order to animation and graphic novel buffs.

There are four stories that play out mainly uninterrupted, while two others that don’t have as much of a narrative structure run in recurring bits throughout the film, between and during the other four. Fear(s) of the Dark begins with Blutch’s installment, featuring a maniacal-looking man traipsing about with four ravenous hounds, unleashing them on anybody he happens to cross paths with. It serves as a suitable interlude between each of the four main segments, which is more than can be said about Pierre Di Sciullo’s segment. In it, a series of Rorschach test-like images move about the screen as a woman’s voice describes what she’s afraid of. An interesting concept, but when the fears described are things like racial hatred and political conservatism it’s plain to see that it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the stories. The four other stories are Charles Burns’ tale of a lonely amateur entomologist who gets more than he bargained for when he hooks up with a comely young lady, Marie Caillou’s wistful ghost story about a young girl visited by strange J-horror-style apparitions, but animated in the manga-like fashion of a children’s story, Lorenzo Mattotti’s flashback-style yarn about a monster terrorizing a village, and Richard McGuire’s creepy vision of a man who takes refuge from a storm in an abandoned (or is it?) house.

Fear(s) of the Dark is absolutely gorgeous to look at, with each of the animation styles offering something totally different from the others. It’s easy to see how the film played so well on the festival circuit, including at Sundance in 2008. You can’t take anything away from the work of any of these artists; the animation is as lush and beautiful as one could hope for from a black and white film. But it’s also relatively disappointing that only three of the six shorts that make up the film actually hit their mark, with only one of them hitting it out of the ballpark. Blutch’s segment, with his oddly compelling pencil drawings coming to life on screen, isn’t scary so much as it is increasingly horrifying, as each time he unleashes the hounds on a victim, the viewer gets to see more and more of what happens until the final victim’s demise, which is really quite grotesque (awesome!) for an animated film. Burns’ Twilight Zone-ish homage to science fiction takes a page from the Cronenberg book of body horror and has fun with it, and his animations only add to that old school feel. But it’s McGuire’s tale that sticks closest to the concept of the title, and he depicts it elegantly with minimalism. Starting with a black screen once the man enters the house, all that the viewer can see is what our hero sees, with the assistance of whatever light sources are available: candles, fireplaces, matches, shafts of light from a window. The result is that the viewer becomes as tense as the hero and can actually feel his fear as he explores the house, at first curious but quickly switching to being scared for his life as he realizes he may not be alone. Truly frightening stuff.

Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and in 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround, Fear(s) of the Dark is visually stunning to watch, so much so that it’s a shame – and a surprise – that only half the film is actually good. There are some interesting special features included on the DVD as well.

Exhibition Tour of Fear(s) of the Dark in Angouleme by Etienne Robial is exactly that, as the artistic director takes us on a roughly ten-minute tour of an exhibit of images and concepts from the film as he discusses them.

From the Drawing to the Film, Diaporama of Working Documents consists of almost a half-hour of documents and images from the film, with descriptions and interviews thrown in. It’s about as close as you can get to a ‘making of’ documentary for this type of film.

Winner’s Videos and Drawings of the Fear(s) MySpace French Contest is pretty self-explanatory, consisting of about nine minutes of footage of fan-submitted films and art that sticks to the theme.
The Extended Module by Pierre Di Sciullo is an unused segment of the woman blathering on about her mundane fears, all while Di Sciullo’s ink blot images grace the screen.

The features are rounded out by the inclusion of the US trailer and French Teaser for Fear(s) of the Dark.

It’s hard to decide whether or not to recommend Fear(s) of the Dark, so let’s leave it at this: if you’re a fan of comics and animation and you’ve actually heard of any of the six illustrators involved, chances are there’s something in this for you and by all means you should see it. If, however, ‘cartoons’ depicting the macabre side of fear don’t make for a good combination in your mind, you might want to steer clear of Fear(s) of the Dark.

Movie rating – 2.5

Disc Rating – 3