I screamed once and jumped more times than I can count. The scary music starts to play and I can feel a second scream coming. That’s when I lean over and whisper to my best guy friend, “Dakota, can I hold your hand?” Scary movies are something I love. When I’m at home and I can pause it. But being in a theater and in the dark is something I hate doing. It takes scary to a whole new meaning.

“Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark” is a scary thriller involving a girl, Sally Hirst (Bailee Madison), her father, Alex Hirst (Guy Pearce), and the father’s girlfriend, Kim (Katie Holmes).

The thriller starts out in the early nineteen hundreds where a famous artist, Emerson Blackwood (Garry McDonald), has lost his only son to goblin like creatures who feed only on teeth and bones. Blackwood (McDonald) tricks his maid into coming into the basement where he takes out her teeth. Blackwood tries to give the teeth to the goblins in the tiny furnace in his basement, but they won’t accept it because it was not teeth of a child. The creatures then drag in him into the furnace.

The movie, at this point, has got me in the upright fetal potion.  He trips the maid and takes her teeth out! Blackwood is covered in her blood. At the same time I also felt empathy for him. He really did not want to hurt her. He just wanted to get his son back.

Sally has moved in with her father after her mother “gives her to her father”. Her father, Alex Hirst is an architect who has moved into the house of Emerson Blackwood with his girlfriend, Kim who is an interior decorator.  They move into the house in order to remodel it to sell so they are constantly working on it and not giving enough attention to Sally.

While Sally is in the house she stars to hear whispering, hearing voices is always a sign to get out of the house immediately, and tries to investigate. The voices lure her in with telling her they want to be her friend and that nobody wants her but them, not even her father or Kim or her mother.  She finds a secret entrance into Blackwood’s basement where the creatures are locked in the basement.

The sad thing about this movie is that nobody should really be afraid of anything. Especially once they realize what is “in the dark”. The goblin creatures are about five inches off the ground. You could literally step on them and they would be dead. But what gives them that terrifying affect, to me, would b e how fast they move and how many of them there were. The creatures were running through the house and through the air ducts constantly trying to get Sally to turn off the light and causing her to be unable to sleep and causing her father and Kim to think she was delusional.

“Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark” is a well written and well casted movie. Bailee Madison has been seen on “Just Go With It” and even “Wizard Of Waverly Place” so to see her casted in something so scary was a refreshing site. She acted really well for a child in a horror film. If you’re looking for something to jump at, or in my case scream, then this movie is for you. But be sure to bring a friend, mine had to check my car for me!