I remember as a kid back in 1979 watching the mini-series,
“Salem’s Lot and being scared shitless by it at the sight of “Mr. Barlowe”, the
“Nosferatu” looking vampire, who emerged from his coffin in the show’s latter
act. There’s always been something about
that type of vampire that has given me the chills, with its hideous visage and
long, extended fingers that seem to be reaching out to grab you. Too often, most vampire films are about suave
Victorian era aristocrats, who live a secret life drinking blood from
unsuspecting virgins, but very rarely anymore is the vampire portrayed as
decrepit & desiccated creatures who are more monster than man. I will say that thankfully that is one thing
that “From the Dark” gets right with me.
The film opens with a middle aged farmer (Gerry O’Brien)
digging through the soil until he strikes something hard. Upon digging through the mud he, he begins
pulling on the object until it pops out, revealing it to be a wooden
stake. This of course resurrects a nasty
looking vampire creature (Ged Murray), who promptly takes a bite out of the
farmer and drags him into a nearby pond.
Cut to six hours earlier, where we see a young Irish couple,
Sarah (Niamh Algar) & Mark (Stephen Cromwell) driving through the
countryside, apparently on their way to a romantic getaway. While driving through some muddy back roads,
their car gets stuck in a rut, forcing Mark to seek out anyone living nearby while
Sarah hangs back at the car. Now, you’d
think he would bring her with him rather than abandoning her on a deserted road
at night, lest someone unsavory should come along…which of course, someone
unsavory does indeed come along (though nothing becomes of it, other than
seeing the vampire’s silhouette behind Sarah out the back window of the car).
Mark happens upon a farmhouse, which as we soon discover,
belongs to the same farmer that accidentally resurrected the vampire creature,
as he comes stumbling home covered in blood and appears to be out of it. Mark rushes back to Sarah, tells her about
the dazed farmer and how they need to help him, and the two leave the car
behind and head back to the farm together.
Once they arrive the farmer has succumbed to his bat bite and has become
one of the undead. Meanwhile, our decrepit
vampire creature has also shown up, with his eye on both Mark & Sarah.
Froom here on it, it pretty much becomes you’re standard
siege film, as the two characters try to barricade themselves from both the
farmer and the vampire itself. There
were a couple of little touches that I really liked. The first of which is that the vampire cannot
be in the presence of light – and by “light” I mean ANY light, not just
sunlight. In one scene they’re even
using candles to ward it off, almost like a crucifix. It kind of plays a little like “Pitch Black”
in that regard, with night vision shots being used for the vampire’s POV, which
becomes blinding if a light is shone in it’s direction.
The other thing I really appreciated that director Conor
McMahon employed, was keeping the vampire obscured throughout the entire
film. Often we see it standing in the
distance with its eerie stance, or in other shots it’s purposely kept out of
focus, so you never really get a good look at it, thus allowing the imagination
to fill in the missing details (I should note that as hard as McMahon worked to
not show the vampire, I find it to be rather poor marketing that they chose to have
the creature displayed prominently and in full view on the DVD cover).
On the downside, much of the action scenes are very hard to
digest, as there are lots of close up shots and quick cuts that I found threw
me off as to determining where in the house these characters were, or even who
was doing what? Not only that but adding
in how darkly lit everything was just muddled everything all the more.
Still, for such a simple plot, I found “From the Dark” to be
pretty effective at times, despite the film never fully emerging from the dark
enough for me to be able to fully follow the action.
6 out of 10 for me.
