Past Misdeeds: Dark Was the Night (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Some rather weird occurrences are happening in a US small town close to your proverbial deep dark woods. Things start with a missing horse and a line of curious, cloven-hoofed tracks running through the whole of the town, tracks that certainly don’t fit any animal anyone’s ever heard about. Despite, or perhaps even because of, the legends surrounding something living deep in the woods around town, sheriff Paul Shields (Kevin Durand) and his freshly imported formerly New Yorker deputy Donny Saunders (Lukas Haas) don’t believe in any cryptids roaming around town. A rather imaginative hoax seems more plausible to them.

Paul has his head full of other things, too: after the death of one of his two little sons in an accident he blames himself for, his marriage to his wife Susan (Bianca Kajlich) has hit a very rough spot, her now having moved out to live with her parents. So Paul is at first so distracted by his personal problems he doesn’t quite buy into the disquieted attitude around town. The curious incidents are piling up though, and Paul might be emotionally battered but he does take his responsibility towards the people he has sworn to protect very seriously, so he changes his mind about the “hoax” before whatever it is that has come to town can take its first human victim (apart from some introductory ones he doesn’t know about which the film gave to the audience as the mandatory blood toll).

Now, if this doesn’t sound like a dozen SyFy Original creature features: a sheriff with a marriage on the rocks, a typical US small town, a hungry cryptid known from local Native American legends, the former big city deputy running from his own piece of the past, and so on and so forth. Which only goes to show that very often, the point in genre filmmaking isn’t being original, but using the clichés and the tropes you find in the right way.

For that is what makes Jack Heller’s (also responsible for another film that made good with not exactly original ideas in Enter Nowhere) Dark Was the Night as fine a movie as it turns out to be - the thought and care that has been put into these hoary old clichés to make them breathe and come alive again. I think much of this effect is caused by how careful Heller as well as Tyler Hisel’s script approach all of the very traditional elements they’re working with, clearly putting much thought into their place and meaning in the context of their specific narrative, instead of just regurgitating them like many other films would do (sometimes even to fun effect). This is not deconstruction or an “ironic” (shudder) approach to the creature feature, though. Rather, the film takes each old element and applies it as if it were new, more by changing the emphasis on certain elements than by changing the elements themselves.

This careful (careful seems to me the watchword for the film) approach enables the film to turn plot elements that should be tiresome, like the whole dead kid/marriage trouble angle, into something emotionally touching and valid. To my eyes, the film does feel just a decisive bit more honest about the inner lives of its characters here too, aiming for a kind of psychological realism that fits its calm (or should I say careful?) approach to its monster. The way the film tells it, it’s not even feeling dishonest or clichéd that monster fighting actually can pull a guy out of his depression and bring a marriage back on track.

How well the character based parts of the plot work is in part due to the respectful and not melodramatic way these are written but is of course also something the ensemble deserve praise for too. Durand, Kajlich and Haas in particular really hit the emotional spots right, treating the emotional turmoil of their characters in a monster movie with the same respect and care they’d apply to a domestic drama. And since the film very much puts the emphasis on these characters and their inner lives, it gets all the better for it.

This doesn’t mean the film isn’t a really fun low budget monster movie too. Heller does know how to make this part of the film memorable, not surprisingly given the rest of the film’s approach, putting the emphasis here on suspense and expectation, only putting little snatches of the monster on screen for the longest time until it becomes impossible to hide the fact we have a case of a pretty mediocre looking CGI creature. At that point, however, the film has put so much effort and (again) care into building up the situation, the monster, and even the why of its attacks (without falling into a complicated mythology or over-explaining), it could have put a marionette on screen and still deserved all the praise it can get. I do love here, too, that the monster isn’t one of cryptozoology’s greatest hits but again a creature the film has put some thought into, trying to give the creature as much reality as it possibly can while still using certain urban legends.

This sense of realism goes a long way for a film in a genre that mostly goes “yeah, bigfoot/the chupacabra/etc, you know” and does of course fit with the emotional and psychological realism on display as well.


The only moment I found somewhat disappointing was the usual horror movie “gotcha!” ending that has stopped working on me so much I can only ever see it as an empty cynical gesture anymore. Though it has to be said, even here Dark Was the Night keeps to its realistic approach to the strange in so far as the ending actually makes sense in the context of at least some of what we’ve seen before. However, complaining about a movie’s final thirty seconds when the rest of it is so carefully, unassumingly fine really is a luxury problem to have, so I can’t say I minded too much.