Surely,
everyone has heard deaths come in three’s. Or perhaps you assumed things
naturally came in four’s, like the Beatles and the Seinfeld cast. However, for
some shadowy occult presence, it is all about five’s in Austin Reading’s Darkness Rising (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
We
will have to piece together the full story over the course of the film, but it
is pretty clear from the start Madison just barely survived a family massacre.
Initially, it was her mother doing the killing, but her father was apparently
institutionalized afterward, forcing her to live with her cousin Izzy for the
rest of her formative years. The notorious house where it all went down is
scheduled to be demolished so Madison convinces her fiancé Jake and Izzy to accompany
her on a late-night salvage mission and trip down memory lane. Yes, that sounds
like a lovely outing, doesn’t it? Especially considering how odd she has been acting
lately, obsessing over the tally symbol for the number five.
It
turns out all her family’s stuff is still there where they left it (any old LPs
in there?). Of course, so is the evil entity or entities that drove her mother
to madness. To their limit credit, the trio quickly decide it was a really bad
idea to come. Unfortunately, whatever it is, won’t let them leave.
In
terms of mechanics, Darkness Rising is
a surprisingly eerie and claustrophobic haunted-all-the-way-to-Hell-and-back
house horror film. Regrettably, it is marred by some spectacularly bad
decision-making from its main characters. There’s not a lot of head’s-up play
in Darkness. The wrap-around segments
also make no sense in the context of the overall film, but they give us a
chance to play hide-and-seek with cult favorite Ted Raimi, so, so be it.
Tara
Holt, Bryce Johnson, and Katrina Law are all sufficiently credible as Madison
and company. Christian Ganiere is also all kinds of creepy as a mystery child
whose spectral presence will sort of be explained in due time. However, Darkness is defined more by its horror
mise-en-scene than anything its cast can bring to it. The old shunned house and
the abandoned bric-a-brac are indeed quite spooky.
