Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

EclecticEnnui "Fear(s) of the Dark" is amazing, with its intriguing visuals and stories. It ranks as one of the greatest non-Disney animated films I've ever seen, like "Persepolis" and "Grave of the Fireflies". I'm also fond of the theme music. It's as memorable as (dare I say) the theme from "Psycho".The film is an anthology of six horror-like stories; two of them briefly play in-between the other four, as if to sort of introduce you to what you're about to see. One of the intros takes place sometime in the 17th or 18th century, with a mysterious villain walking around with ferocious dogs on leashes. Four of them, just like the stories. With this story's grim animation, and a somewhat disturbing ending, it's perhaps my favourite out of all the stories. Blutch, the animator, also gave the villain an evil face that's hard to forget.I won't write much about the four stories, themselves, but in keeping with the dark atmosphere of the film, they're about demonic possessions, outcasts, death, and exploring the unknown. Each has a different style of animation, and whilst it looks fairly simplistic, overall, it's still enjoyable to watch.Even though the film is not about making the viewer jump out of their seat with scares, I have to say there were a couple of times where I felt like it. That rarely happens to me when I watch other obvious horror films in recent memory, like "Quarantine" or "My Bloody Valentine 3D". (No bashing involved.)If there's one complaint I have about "Fear(s) of the Dark", it's that the English subtitles are white, on a black and white film! Wouldn't it be common sense to have them with black outlines, so they don't blend in when the screen is white? I *was* able to make out most of the dialogue, but it was still annoying. Be warned, on that part.Actually, another little complaint is that a couple of stories could've been longer, because they didn't feel like they were finished. The film's running time is only 85 minutes, so why not? Well, maybe I'm expecting too much from the filmmakers. I dunno."Fear(s) of the Dark" is a near-masterpiece. For an anthology film, it didn't feel uneven. The stories all flowed nicely together. If the subtitles are fixed for the DVD, then it's a keeper.

newhealthrock 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.

dbborroughs Multipart animated film from France that is probably high on the love list of Mike Mignola and Frank Miller since its very often all black screens with very little white. Another one from IFC Films that is a rather disappointing film on all but the artistic level. The stories are linked by a lord of some sort walking his dogs across a landscape and setting one loose on a person periodically. This leads into an abstract animated piece with narration which then leads into the stories. The first story is from Charles Burns and it plays like a Charles Burns story, with a guy finding a weird bug that gets loose as he is picked up by a possessive girl.Another story is a manga or anime like tale of a little girl who is being tormented. The third is about a a monster on the loose and the final one concerns a man who breaks into a house.(I think I missed a very short one, but frankly its no loss). None of the stories are really scary or creepy (Maybe the Burns piece is the best because of the unease of the interpersonal relationships.) Worse they are all the sort of tales that we've seen before, mores so if you love short horror fiction be it books, TV films or radio. What works here is the art which at times seems more like fine etchings or story illustrations come to life. it beautiful stuff (the exception being the Charles Burns stuff which looks like everything he's ever done). Worth a look only if you like animation as art, and even then I'd wait for a rental.(I had such high hopes)

foodi A short preface: the device of chopping up and interspersing the segments was not completely successful, in my opinion. The individual episodes would have been more cohesive and effective if each had been told uninterrupted, and this would have benefited the film as a whole.Richard Mcguire's final segment was far and away the most inventive in the use of shadow/light, and i think was easily the most elaborate and accomplished of all the segments (hence my decision to begin with it). His short alone would have warranted a recommendation for PEUR(S) DU NOIR. (thankfully the producers chose to leave this one intact, and it serves as a glorious ending to this collection. Splendid! 9/10 Lorenzo Mattotti's young-boy-reminiscing/mysterious-beast tale comes in a close second for me.. i especially liked its superb gunshots-in-the-dark climax. 8/10The impressionistic, primal style of Blutch's opening segment (wild dogs being led around London by a sadistic handler) was more disturbing than frightening (that said, it was hardly unenjoyable), and offered some of the more haunting images of the movie (i daresay this short suffered the most from being split up). A seamless telling would have netted an 8/10, but as it stands, i give this a 7/10I wasn't so impressed with Charles Burns' segment (creepy tale about a young lad being dominated by a mysterious love interest), although it had its own perverse charm. Reminded me instantly of the Black Hole comics in its artistic style as well as its psycho-sexual overtones (no surprise, then, when i discovered they share the same author!). This one squeaks past 6 to 7/10Marie Caillou's tale was the least memorable primarily because of its flash-animated visual style. Still, it was surreal and interesting. Once again, this suffered from being told episodically. 6/10If i had to pick an overall weakness in particular, it would be Pierre Di Scullo's freestyle monologue linking the segments. Occasionally amusing as it was, its accompanying abstract visuals were disappointingly uninspired. Not only was it thematically somewhat incongruent with the rest of the film, the absence of this light-hearted intermission would have made the film more powerful in its entirety (no doubt the intention of the film-makers WAS to afford audiences a brief respite every few minutes from the terror , i felt this decision unnecessary) 5/10Overall score: an impressive 8/10 (bumped up from 7 thanks to Mcguire)