Yawn of the Dead

Remember what it feels like to be scared by an American-made horror movie? Good for you. Hold on to that memory, because right now it's all you've got. American moviegoers are suffering the esthetic equivalent of a trade deficit. Over the last 10 years, almost every remotely original horror movie that played in U.S. theaters was made overseas-in Japan, China or Taiwan, and sometimes Denmark (Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, Parts 1 and 2, recently remade for ABC by Stephen King) or Latin America (Guillermo del Toro's Spanish Civil War creep-fest The Devil's Backbone, for instance). The handful of American-made fright flicks worth seeing tended to be remakes of Asian movies (The Ring) or films which, in retrospect, appear to have been influenced by Asian horror (The Others was shot in England by a Spanish director, yet feels like The Turn of the Screw by way of Hideo Nakata).

M. Night Shyamalan is arguably the only commercially successful American horror director who's offered anything like a fresh style, but the elemental flaw in that style becomes more obvious with each film he makes: you can't be Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski at the same time, especially when you're not as talented as either. Notwithstanding pleasant surprises like Zack Snyder's raucous Dawn of the Dead remake-which was as much an action flick and social satire as a straight-up horror film-it's slim pickings.

The situation has become an embarrassment. Hide and Seek and Alone in the Dark do nothing to alleviate it. They're the dregs of January. Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, the original Exorcist, John Boorman's great, unjustly maligned Exorcist II and the original Alien sear key images onto your memory and ruin mundane activities for years. (After I saw Jaws for the first time as a kid, I had nightmares about sharks attacking me in a swimming pool.) The internet film critic Frank Woodward says, "Great horror movies scar you." You can sit through Hide and Seek and Alone in the Dark without suffering so much as a scratch.

You know Hide and Seek is going to spring a Shyamalan-style "surprise" as soon as the film's hero, David Callaway (Robert De Niro), awakes from a quick-cut, incomprehensible nightmare, which ultimately morphs into the dream version of what Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion calls "The gradually expanding flashback." Callaway is grieving over the death of his wife, Alison (Amy Irving), a depressed woman who put her darling daughter Emily (Dakota Fanning) to bed one night, then slit her wrists in a bathtub. Father and daughter forsake New York for a lovely old house upstate, and soon enough, Emily is having secretive conversations with an imaginary playmate named Charlie. David assumes that Charlie is merely a projection of Emily's trauma, but the evidence (strangled cat, creepy child drawings, bloody messages on walls) suggests otherwise. Various neighbors and loved ones take an interest in David and Emily's plight-including a lovely neighbor (Elisabeth Shue) who fancies David and a child psychologist named Katherine (Famke Janssen) who comes all the way from New York City to check up on Emily-but father and daughter are so closed-off that their pain seems almost impenetrable. Despite the flawed material, De Niro delivers a tender, nuanced performance as a father who's redirected his agony into patriarchal lectures and self-help blather. And Fanning is eerily good, as always-a little girl with an old woman's seen-it-all stare.

There's a good movie in here-a horror film about a father and daughter so traumatized by grief that they either lose their grip on reality, or unknowingly invite paranormal forces to come feed on their misery-but the filmmakers aren't interested in teasing it out. Screenwriter Ari Schlossberg and director John Polson (Swimfan) approach this material in the most obvious way, hewing to a commercial template established by a host of movies that generate "surprise" by withholding key pieces of information from the viewer. That cheat is as old as O. Henry, and defensible, but it's grown tired from overuse, and if I don't see it again for a few years it'll be all right with me.

Polson appears to have watched The Tenant, The Amityville Horror, The Shining and other classic shockers, and he dots the movie with references that are sometimes functional, sometimes merely clever. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski isn't afraid to immerse swaths of the screen in darkness, and the film's interior long shots, clearly modeled on The Shining, make David's new house a physical analog for the new mental space they hope to construct upstate. But these touches invite unflattering comparisons. One of the things that made The Shining special was its intellectualized preference for suspense over surprise. You knew from the start that Jack Torrance was going to lose his sanity; the suspense came from slowly watching it happen, and wondering whether Wendy and little Danny would sense the magnitude of the threat and respond in time. Hide and Seek is far less sophisticated. In keeping so many of Charlie and Emily's crucial emotional changes off-screen, it robs audiences of the chance to participate in their story, and asks its leading actors to hoodwink the audience with what amounts to a narrative shell game.

Hide and Seek doesn't achieve much, but at least is has ambition, which is more than you can say for Alone in the Dark, a loud, trashy, crudely photographed action-horror picture starring Christian Slater as Edward Carnby, an ass-kicking paranormal investigator trying to save the world from invasion by ancient demon beasts from another dimension. The tale gets off to an intriguingly witless start with a voice-over-narrated opening crawl that goes on and on and on; just when you think the narrator is about to wrap things up, another paragraph creeps onto the screen. Other treats include a fight between Slater and a henchman as comically long as the fight between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live!, and Tara Reid trying to intellectualize her image by donning spectacles and playing a scientist who effortlessly rattles off Star Trek-ready mumbo jumbo while still managing to mispronounce the word "Newfoundland." As a scheming scientist who wants to help the ancient demon beasts sneak into our world, Mathew Walker wears what appears to be one of the late Martin Balsam's hats, and says things like, "Intercept him at the airport, get the artifact and kill him!" (Director Uwe Boll and many of his collaborators are Germans shooting a movie in Vancouver; much of the dialogue has the odd cadence of subtitles that have been retranslated two or three times.)

It's all so unselfconsciously goofy and inept that during the first 20 minutes, your spirits lift in anticipation of a rare B-picture that's straightforwardly awful, rather than knowingly "awful." (The growling, galumphing monsters have a Ray Harryhausen quality; even though they're CGI, they still feel handmade.) But after a while, the incompetence adds up-klutzy Steadicam work, washed-out visuals, monsters seen full-frame from the start rather than being revealed gradually-and Boll's good-enough-for-government-work attitude becomes tiresome and depressing. If a horror film can't scar you, it should scare you, or at least not bore you.