The Darkness is directed by Greg McLean, the very same Greg McLean who directed the Australian shocker Wolf Creek over a decade ago. Whether the sheer genericness (I’m pretty sure I just made this word up) of Hollywood horror has infected Greg McLean is unclear, but the two films look as though they were directed by different guys.
The Darkness is about a family of four who are terrorized by some ancient spirits when their autistic son, Michael (David Mazouz), brings back some rocks that are connected to some ancient spiritual rituals of a society that used to live in the Grand Canyon. It’s quite easy to plot a course for the movie’s storyline from the point where Michael finds the rocks, the mother searches for supernatural stuff on the internet (failing to convince the disbelieving father), and the film’s inevitable conclusion, where the family confronts the demons haunting their home with help from some mystical foreigner.
I said it before and I’d say it again: even the most forgettable horror films aren’t normally badly made, and even if The Darkness tows the generic line faithfully, it’s not a dreadfully made film. That said, however, the film’s subplots are appalling; the teenager’s daughter’s bulimia issues are raised once and completely forgotten about; such is the low time frame they dedicated to the subplot, they needn’t have bothered.