Watch Fear(s) of the Dark For Free

Perfect cast and a good story

Overrated and overhyped

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Jacques (the other poster who gave this a 1-star rating) is right. There is no entertainment value in this film whatsoever. When I get into horror fiction, I don't need to see a blonde girl screaming her head off as she runs from some monster. What I look for in a good horror story is unsettling atmosphere and good characterization. I got neither in this film anthology.Look at the reviews for this film on the IMDb boards and they call this film "nauseatingly pretentious" and "artsy-fartsy". That's true. If you don't like pretentious or art-house films then do not waste your time with this anthology. The pacing in all these segments are slow. I don't think any of them are more than 15 minutes total but each felt three times longer.Too many times I watched these segments and was literally and figuratively left in the dark. I'd wonder, "What just happened?", skip back to see, and still would be lost. The stories lack any pull that entrances the viewer and makes him want to see more. I fell asleep during all 4 times I watched this movie. No lie.The makers of this movie forgot fear is an irrational emotion brought on by our own prejudices. As a result, we must emphasize emotionally with the characters and the situation they are in to be scared. But they tried to intellectualize fear--and did it in a way that came off as a tedious waste of time.I cannot recommend this movie to anyone, even art-house fans. This movie is a waste of time unless you desperately need something to cure insomnia. Just so you know, this movie is in black and white, but subtitled in white, which made it difficult to read at times. That did not bother me. It's just the plodding pacing, lack of characterizations, and inconclusive endings that bothered me.

Fear(s) of the Dark isn't the horror film I was hoping for. It's creepy, twisted and dark, but is also distant. It's really a portfolio of work collected by a number of talented animators. Every animation focuses on fear and nightmares in some way. Each of the individual tales has a dreamlike quality, allowing the films to avoid any responsibility they may have to tell a story. Complaining about the story may seem too harsh, but I the end I really had no connection to what was going on. The artistic skills on display can't be challenged in anyway, but so much more could have been achieved with the expansion of just one story. Certainly worth a look for some imaginative imagery.

The stories and the animation were mildly interesting, but it could have used some color. The awfully drab browns and grays with, occasional tinting, began to depress me after awhile.The really (and I mean REALLY) bad parts were the segments between the stories with that horrible woman squawking like a really annoying buzzard, over those idiotic moving shapes. Every time her rotten voice hit our ears everyone (all six people) in the theater groaned. Nobody cares about her stupid European elitist fears. She should be more afraid of her head and body becoming two separate entities sometime in the future than whether or not she's becoming more "right-wing".It made me want to stand up and shake my fist at the moving rectangles and scream, "Shut up you loudmouthed b---h!!" She ruined the movie.I've read what others are saying about the white subtitles, but I really I really have much trouble reading them. However that obnoxious woman made me wish I was illiterate.

Here is the producer Prima Linea Productions' summary of the film Fear(s) of the Dark/Peur(s) du noir (2007) which combines the work of eight artists:"Spiders' legs brushing against naked skin... Unexplainable noises heard at night in a dark bedroom... A big empty house where you feel a presence... A hypodermic needle getting closer and closer... A dead thing trapped in a bottle of formaldehyde... A huge growling dog, baring its teeth and staring... So many scary moments we have experienced at some point in our lives – like the craftsmen of this journey straight to the land of fear. Six of the worlds hottest graphic artists and cartoonists have breathed life into their nightmares, bleeding away colour only to retain the starkness of light and the pitch black of shadows. Their intertwined stories make up an unprecedented epic where phobias, disgust and nightmares come to life and reveal Fear at its most naked and intense..."The artists are Blutch, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Jerry Kramski, Lorenzo Mattoti, Richard McGuire, Michel Pirus, and Romain Slocombe. They are designers who have done logos, product designs, and other things besides animation. Some of the black and white drawings are gorgeous, rich, subtle, pleasing to the eye--even distractingly so. Where the images are most beautiful, the animation is most lacking.The best story is one by Charles Burns of a nerdy boy who loves insects and grows up isolated and timid as a college student. Like the sucker Koistinen in Aki Kaurismaki's 2006 film 'Lights in the Dusk,' he is then seduced by a woman who only wants to entrap and use him, only this one is far more sinister and is perhaps the descendant of a praying mantis-like bug the man lost under his bed long years ago (he still sleeps in the same bed). Combining elements of Poe and Kafka, this story, which sensibly combines story elements that don't quite fit, is genuinely creepy. The drawing is fluent but utilitarian.Caillou's story is set in Japan and concerns that standard image of Japanese helplessness and provocation to perverts, a uniformed schoolgirl. There is also a sinister doctor with a big hypodermic and the ghost of a samurai and a creature with several layers of eyes. The trouble is that this story frequently interrupts itself and never finishes.In between these are two other stories, because it is the team's aim to make their omnibus into some kind of seamless whole. First there is the animations of Blutch of the eighteenth-century man with a team of snarling dogs who attack a helpless boy. Then there is the screen of geometric games by Pierre di Sciullo, entertaining us with imagery that ranges from Saul Bass to the Russian Avant Garde, while an ironic, nagging woman (well voiced by Nicole Garcia, who has made a career of this kind of character) lists things she's "afraid of" or doesn't want to become.Otherwise, I was not very taken by the stories and at times could barely follow them. The device of intermixing two of the animations/short films with the five others is a laudable effort to achieve unity and flow, but it only makes a confusing collection more so.The language is French, though the team is multinational, including American and Italian. The film was shown at Sundance as part of a horror series. The images have a pencil look, achieved however with the latest technologies. For connoisseurs of black and white drawing in film, this is worth a look for the different styles. But as a cutting edge horror or scare movie or an accomplished series of animations, this collection seems very over-hyped.The film, shown at Sundance in January 2008 and at international festivals, debuted in Paris theaters February 18, 2008, and is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, February 29-March 9.