There are many kinds of horror movies. Some terrify you. Some disturb you. Some burrow into your psyche and stay there for years. And then there’s The Darkness — a movie so bland it makes you long for the sweet embrace of an actual haunting, just for something to happen.
Directed by Greg McLean, the man behind Wolf Creek and The Belko Experiment, this supernatural snooze-fest is what happens when Poltergeist and a Home Depot ad have a baby and that baby grows up to fail film school. It’s 92 minutes of jump scares that couldn’t wake a cat, family drama written by someone who’s never met one, and Native American mysticism treated with all the cultural sensitivity of a Cracker Barrel placemat.
The Plot: Five Rocks and No Rolling
The movie begins with a family trip to the Grand Canyon — that old reliable setting where good things always happen in horror movies. Peter Taylor (Kevin Bacon) is your standard-issue dad who’s busy, emotionally constipated, and wearing too much REI. His wife Bronny (Radha Mitchell) is a stressed-out mom whose hobbies include cleaning and crying. They’ve brought along their teenage daughter Stephanie (Lucy Fry), who’s bulimic, and their young autistic son Mikey (David Mazouz), who is too pure for this world — or at least too pure for this script.
During the trip, Mikey discovers a mysterious Kiva cavern and pockets some ancient black stones decorated with tribal markings, because apparently “don’t touch the cursed object” wasn’t covered in his school’s field trips. These stones, naturally, contain demons. The family returns home, and things get weird — though not entertaining weird. Just “the faucets are running again” weird.
Soon the house is haunted by a series of budget-friendly paranormal activities: handprints on mirrors, animal shadows, and the faint rustle of the audience’s collective boredom. The family dog doesn’t even bother reacting — and frankly, neither did I.
The Family That Fails Together
Kevin Bacon tries his best, God bless him. He delivers his lines with the gravitas of a man who’s realized he’s in a Blumhouse film that isn’t one of the good ones. His character arc is “workaholic dad learns to care about his son,” which in this movie translates to “Kevin Bacon stares at his phone until demons attack.”
Radha Mitchell spends the film oscillating between tears and Google searches. Her entire contribution to the narrative is typing “Native American demon rocks what do” into the search bar while drinking white wine.
Their daughter Stephanie exists mainly to vomit discreetly into Tupperware and get choked by ghost hands — a role that could’ve been performed by a moderately well-trained fern. And Mikey, poor kid, spends the entire film being manipulated by invisible forces and adults who are too stupid to notice the word “portal” written on the wall in soot.
You know your movie’s in trouble when the autistic child has the most consistent character development.
The Horror: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
For a film called The Darkness, it sure is well-lit. Every supposedly scary moment happens in broad daylight or under a 100-watt bulb. The demons themselves are based on five Anasazi spirit animals — a crow, a snake, a coyote, a wolf, and a buffalo — which sounds metal as hell until you realize the CGI looks like rejected PlayStation 2 cutscenes.
When the snake appears, it’s not terrifying — it’s confusing. Is it real? Is it spiritual? Is it a leftover asset from Anaconda 2? Even the crow seems embarrassed to be here.
The movie doesn’t even commit to its own rules. Sometimes the demons can kill you. Sometimes they just make the sink overflow. Sometimes they choke people; other times they just stand in doorways like they’re waiting for the Wi-Fi to reconnect.
You’d think a film about supernatural entities feeding on fear would, you know, try to be scary. Instead, The Darknessfeels like a haunted house built by a focus group that decided “PG-13 and forgettable” was a good business model.
The “Culture” Part: How to Offend an Entire Civilization
Ah yes, the Anasazi mythology. Because what’s a 2010s horror movie without casually appropriating Native American spirituality and turning it into a demon problem for suburban white people?
The film treats indigenous religion like an FAQ section for idiots. “What are these rocks?” “They’re cursed!” “What kind of curse?” “The ancient kind!” “How do we fix it?” “Return the rocks!”
That’s it. That’s the lore. Thousands of years of spiritual complexity boiled down to “evil buffalo ghost wants its rocks back.” It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone mistaking a dreamcatcher for a Wi-Fi booster.
The Exorcism Scene: Two Random Strangers Fix Everything
Eventually, Peter and Bronny realize they’re in over their heads, which is impressive considering they’ve spent the whole film ignoring every warning sign. So they call a psychic named Teresa (Alma Martinez) and her granddaughter Gloria (Ilza Rosario Ponko), who show up like paranormal plumbers.
These two women, who’ve had zero buildup or context, immediately announce that the house is full of evil energy. (Thanks, we noticed.) They start chanting in a mix of Spanish and bad special effects until the demons finally decide they’ve had enough of this nonsense and pack up their haunted luggage.
The climax involves Peter following Mikey into a “portal” — which looks suspiciously like a closet with a fan in it — where he faces his fears and fails miserably. Mikey, proving he’s the only functional person in this family, puts the rocks back and ends the curse.
The movie concludes with everyone hugging in slow motion while Gloria proclaims, “The house is clean.” Spoiler: it’s not. You can still smell the script’s desperation.
The Real Horror: Blumhouse on Autopilot
Produced by Blumhouse Tilt, The Darkness proves that even the studio that gave us Get Out, Insidious, and Paranormal Activity occasionally hits the “random horror generator” button.
The film has all the hallmarks of mid-2010s horror-by-committee:
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A family with “issues.” Check.
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A token mythology ripped from Wikipedia. Check.
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An autistic child used as a plot device. Double check.
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A third-act cleansing performed by someone’s aunt with sage. Check and mate.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of microwaving a leftover Poltergeist script and forgetting to hit “start.”
Kevin Bacon, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?
Let’s take a moment to appreciate Kevin Bacon, a man who’s survived dancing bans (Footloose), giant worms (Tremors), and invisible perverts (Hollow Man). Yet even he cannot save The Darkness. Watching him deliver lines about “evil spirits feeding on fear” with total sincerity feels like witnessing a man paying off a very specific mortgage.
Radha Mitchell, equally talented, deserves better than scenes where her character discovers haunted faucets. And poor David Mazouz — who later played young Bruce Wayne in Gotham — spends most of the movie staring blankly at green screens while people yell his name.
Final Verdict: 3/10 — A Supernatural Sedative
The Darkness isn’t terrifying. It’s tranquilizing. It’s not so much a horror film as it is a slow march toward the credits, punctuated by occasional crow noises and Kevin Bacon sweating meaningfully.
There’s no suspense, no stakes, and no reason for it to exist beyond filling a release slot on Friday the 13th. It’s as if Greg McLean tried to make The Conjuring, but accidentally made a movie about home maintenance gone wrong.
Even the title feels lazy. “The Darkness”? Really? It’s like calling Jaws “The Fish.”
If you ever find yourself tempted to watch this movie, just stare at a black screen for 90 minutes while Kevin Bacon whispers “return the rocks” every few minutes. It’ll save you time, and the experience will be roughly identical — though arguably scarier.
Because in The Darkness, the real horror isn’t the demons.
It’s the soul-crushing realization that you paid to see it.
