Photo courtesy Charles Agron Productions.
Birthdays can often be bittersweet combinations of reveling in one’s own existence while lamenting being one year closer to one’s own demise. But for Nick Di Santo (Luke Kleintank), his 23rd birthday includes a lifetime’s worth of highs and lows in Dark House. On the one extreme, some friends take him to a bar for some birthday drinks, he meets a lovely lady (Alex McKenna) and overcomes his social anxieties enough to end up in bed with said lady later that night. To counter all that, however, Nick pays a depressing visit to a Bedlam-looking mental institution earlier that day, where his mother (while babbling at the walls) almost reveals who Nick’s father is before Nick has a vision of how his mother is going to die (this clairvoyance seems to happen to Nick when he touches certain people, presumably those who are going to die in the near future). Then, after Nick and his ladyfriend finish the birthday copulation, his premonition becomes reality as he finds out his mother has been killed in a fire at the hospital.
Talk about an eventful birthday! Oh, and apparently Nick was so excited to be bringing a girl home that he forgot to use protection because his now-girlfriend is incredibly pregnant when the film jumps forward eight months. Also, his girlfriend’s name is Eve, the first of many biblical references in the film. In addition to having a baby on the way, Nick also finds out that his mother has willed him a house. Not just any house, though. This house is the same one he has been dreaming about and drawing for as long as he can remember, and is still compulsively drawing today.
Photo courtesy Charles Agron Productions.
Naturally, he gets his about-to-burst girlfriend and some other friends together and takes a road trip up I-23 (that number comes up a lot) to the town where this house is located. Turns out there is no town, but there is a dinner where some locals inform Nick that the town and his house washed away in a flood 23 years ago. Then Nick finds a framed picture of his house (covered in a thick film of dust, indicating the Health Department doesn’t stop by too often) and is off to find it once again. After a Blair Witch-like search, Nick finds the house fully intact in the woods. And out comes Seth (who looks familiar, but I didn’t realize was Saw‘s Tobin Bell until the end credits rolled), a haggardly creepy guy who comes across like a homeless street preacher with malicious intent.
Like Nick’s mother and other characters in Dark House, Seth converses with the voice in the air vents and knows something about Nick that Nick is trying to find out. After allowing only Nick inside the house, Seth maintains his cryptic disposition while some zombie-like figures arrive outside to spook Nick’s friends (and a couple of land surveyors that helped them find the house). Nick and his friends flee, these zombie things give chase (in a creepy sideways gallop), one guy ends up with an ax embedded in his anatomy and they all escape to a Twilight Zone-like small town that appears to be abandoned to Nick’s group, but the townspeople can see them. They try to head back home, but somehow end up back at the house in the woods, where they decide to spend the night rather than stay outside and risk being terrorized by the zombie things again.
Photo courtesy Charles Agron Productions.
Needless to say it’s not a peaceful night’s rest, and I’m not spoiling anything by saying that this house gets creepier as the night progresses, and Nick’s group starts to get picked off one by one. If it sounds like Dark House is derivative of previous horror films like Final Destination, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Cabin in the Woods, that’s because it is. And after Nick has a shocking moment with Eve and their unborn child, there’s a bit of The Omen/Rosemary’s Baby-like foreshadowing of this child’s future.
But despite the many chilling cliché’s employed by Dark House, the film manages to build up to a suspenseful twist that changes the viewer’s perspective on everything that has happened previously. And like any good horror flick, it sets things up perfectly for a sequel.