It’s that time of the year again, and while gratuitous gore fests and campy teen flicks dominate the Halloween box office, a limited release animation offers a more raw and psychological presentation of horror. “Fears of the Dark” was a French contribution to the Sundance Film Festival of 2008, now in select theaters. The film is a showcase of shorts by a team of French, American and Italian artists – each with his or her own unique style, all united in black and white.
“Fears of the Dark” literally opens on an intense note, with a pulse-pounding soundtrack to the opening credits. Overwhelmingly loud barking signals the first of several segments by Blutch. The gritty, pencil-drawn narrative of a creepy aristocrat and his attack dogs is one of the more disturbing entries, escalating in violence while weaving between other segments for the first two-thirds of the film.
The first full short by Charles Burns concerns a nerdy student whose love of insect specimens takes him to college and a seemingly hopeless desire for a girlfriend. When a woman shows interest in him, it seems too good to be true – and it is. The dynamics of the controlling relationship amplify and out-stage the more traditional creepiness of the parasitic bugs.
Marie Caillou’s anime-inspired nightmare is the story of a Japanese schoolgirl forced into a trip through her own head. It has an effectively oppressive feel, as the ghosts and monsters in her dreams are only as scary as the class bullies and the sketchy psychiatrist who has her confined to bed while injecting sedatives.
Lorenzo Mattotti’s entry is surprisingly laid-back. A village boy’s story about the hunt for a murderous beast sounds more like a nostalgic campfire tale than a follow-up in character with the first two entries.
The final full cartoon by Richard Maguire is a slow-paced, minimalist study of light and shadow. A man finds himself stranded in a dark, abandoned house. The point of fear is accessible; ancient family photos of unsmiling ancestors really are creepy.
This always artsy, sometimes scary anthology begs to be seen as a connection with everyday fears rather than a traditional jump-out-of-your-seat horror film. This is made obvious by the unifying animation by Pierre de Scuillo, which weaves in and out of the other cartoons. Like a stereotypical psychiatric patient free-associating, Nicole Garcia’s voiceover, accompanied by abstract geometric lines and shapes, rambles about her relationship to society and anxiety about becoming too normal and “too bourgeois.”
Unfortunately, the arrangement isn’t always effective – the film makes a mistake in placing the most intense sequences before all the slower ones. The inertia is unsettling and detracts from the experience, but it is still a unique film worth watching.
