n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I grew up on horror anthologies. Be it a book of horror short stories, or be it TV series like The Twilight Zone—I loved, and still love, good horror anthologies. When I heard about Fear(s) of the Dark, I'm not going to lie, I wasn't very intrigued. Mainly because horror anthologies, lately, have been totally worthless. Where originality and truly weirdly captivating ideas used to be, now horror anthologies are just filled with genre clichés. But I gave Fear(s) of the Dark a try anyway. As negative as I am about the entertainment industry, I still have a blind faith that someone, anyone other than myself and a select few of my favorite authors/directors, can come up with an original and captivating story. And I had my faith crushed.Fear(s) of the Dark starts out fine. Not great, but fine. The first segment, which entails a semi-unique story of a man and his bug problems, isn't amazing by any means, but it's by far the best you get from Fear(s) of the Dark. After that decent segment, there is absolutely nothing else worth watching. The other five stories are all either painfully clichéd, or they're done in such a way that they're so utterly boring, they're nearly impossible to watch. Some of them, such as the one about the alligator, are just pointless. They're equivalent of someone verbally telling you the plot outline of a Dora the Explorer episode: yes, technically, they're defined as a story, but in reality they're not. There's no significance.Speaking of Dora the Explorer, another major problem with this anthology is the unabashed lack of maturity. Just like in every cliché horror movie, there's severed heads and boobs in Fear(s) of the Dark, but there is NOTHING mature about the stories behind the "mature" images. Everything about the stories are simplistic and juvenile. It's become a pop fad with generic "dark" fantasy authors/directors like Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro to take a child's fairy tale and reimaging them for grown-ups. But what these writers—and I am in no way limiting this statement to the two I mentioned above—fail to realize is, adding violence and some heavy themes done not make a child's story mature. The best example of this is the new film Watchmen, which reminded me of an episode of The Wiggles with a few spurts of generic blood-spray. I honestly felt like I was watching a little kid's movie. Heavy themes and "graphic" images don't make something mature. What makes something mature is the nature in which the story is told. If you were to cut someone's arm off in real life, the nature is brutal and sick. If you cut someone's arm off in a movie, the nature is generally taken as fun PG-13 gore. The motives are what makes something mature. And fantasy writers don't understand that. The writers of Fear(s) of the Dark understand it even less. And it shows.The art is pretty decent, I guess. I didn't see anything too amazing about it, but it certainly wasn't bad. It's no better or worse than you'd see in your average graphic novel. I'm sure these artists could do better, but I'm not going to complain about it. What I am going to complain about, though, is the subtitles. The version I got had yellow subtitles, and I could read every word fine, but there's the problem: reading takes away from the movie A LOT. I love a lot of foreign films, so using subtitles is my second nature, and I've never once complained about subtitles in any of the foreign films I've seen. But with Fear(s) of the Dark, the movie forces you to be reading when you should be concentrating on the artwork. At least five times, I had to rewind and re-watch a scene because I was reading the subtitles and a major plot point happened on screen, and I missed it totally. This becomes very annoying very fast. A few times, I thought I might as well just turn the movie off because the effort it took to concentrate on the art and on the subtitles at the same time was not nearly worth the payoff. Another problem with the execution of the film is the pathetic starving-artist monologues between each segment. Well, let me take that back: Another problem with the execution of the film is the pathetic execution in general, highlighted by the pathetic starving-artist monologues between each segment.And finally, we get to the blatant lack of entertainment value. This is by far THE least interesting animated film I have ever watched in my life. I fell asleep and had to rewind nearly ten times. It came to the point where I literally had to stand up and walk around just to stay awake for the ending of the film. There is no excuse for a movie, any movie, to be this utterly boring. The reasons it's boring is because, (1), the lack of originality, thus the lack of captivation, and, (2), because the artists focus so much on their average artwork, that the storytelling is oftentimes put on second burner, or just forgotten about completely.I could be frilly and come up with a creative way to end this review, but I'm not going to. I'm going to put as much effort in this concussion as the artists put into this film: Fear(s) of the Dark is bad. Don't watch it.(Do I sound like a kindergartener when I put my final opinion in that shallow of a statement? So do the artists when they put their art in this shallow of a movie.) 2/10

After seeing Fear(s) of The Dark I think I can safely say I was as, or more, affected than I have ever been after watching a film. Not since the horrific denouement of Haneke's original Funny Games do I think I have even come close to being as physically shook up as I was after seeing this film. A collaboration between six graphic artists and animators, I suppose if it must be distilled into the crudest possible collision of reference points it could be summarised as Stephen King meets Waking Life (Richard Linklater's 2001 film composed of rotoscope animation vignettes) yet that doesn't come anywhere close.The artists who have visualised nightmares for this project are Philadelphia native Charles Burns, ubiquitous to graphic novel fans due to his masterly disturbing book Black Hole; former Liquid Liquid bassist Richard McGuire; Belgian resident Marie Caillou; Christian Hinckler (better known by his pseudonym Blutch), and Italian Lorenzo Mattotti. Interspersing these animated tales are kaleidoscopic dancing patterns which are, through their hypnotic abstractions, perhaps the most visually mesmerising sequences in the whole film. These patterns are set to the vacuous middle-class fears and worries of a bourgeois woman, and the insubstantiality of her worries sets a theme which extends throughout the film. None of the fears represented in any of the narrative threads are viable. They are all tales of terror which one wouldn't have been surprised to find lurking in a battered Goosebumps paperback in the late nineties. This doesn't matter, though, because the film's power lies in its incredibly paced orchestrations of image and sound.After a joyously Gothic title sequence in which the film's name flashes on the screen at least five times (in a barrage of words reminiscent of Godard at his most poetically despotic) we are presented with an introduction to Blutch's storyline, which extends throughout the film. A hellish figure dressed in the clothes of a 18th century dandy roams a barren landscape with a pack of ferocious canines, hunting down unsuspecting victims and then proceeding to violently rip them apart (the last of which is a remarkably gory sequence). Ironically, considering the content of these scenes, Blutch's animation style is most reminiscent of either Raymond Briggs (In the constant shimmering of his charcoal textures) or the Walt Disney studios house style (In the fluidity of his characters' movements). Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti present two sequences which are most reminiscent of scary bed-time stories, both being narrated in first-person. Visually, though, they couldn't be more different. Charles Burns' is, as you might imagine, the most like a moving graphic novel. The art is unmistakeably his, very clean-cut black lines without any grey, and the pictures tell the story of a conscientious student who embarks on a love affair with a girl which descends into an insectoid hell in a methodical, coherent style. Mattotti, on the other hand, tells the story of an eerie beast terrorising a small pastoral community in a free-and-easy sketchy style, with images that swim in and out of view like a dream.This is not the best representation of a bad dream within the film, though. That accolade goes to Marie Caillou, who presents to us an Oriental phantasm. A macabre inversion of a Studio Ghibli fantasy which gets more surreal as it proceeds, a young girl is tormented by dangers both real and imaginary. Not since The Mystery Man talked to Bill Pullman at the party in Lost Highway has a nightmare been so well orated on screen and it had a large majority of the audience locked in a collective terror. While Caillou's segment had an undeniable effect on the viewers, the last sequence, by Richard McGuire, is perhaps the most powerful of them all. Employing nothing but block black-and-white shapes to tell the story of a man who is haunted in a house by a mysterious woman, for the most part of his segment he eschews all non-diegetic music. The audience is thereby made extremely sensitive to every single movement made by the objects on screen and so the slightest motion, such as a hat-box dropping to the floor, causes the heart to skip a beat.

Multipart animated film from France that is probably high on the love list of Mike Mignola and Frank Miller since its very often all black screens with very little white. Another one from IFC Films that is a rather disappointing film on all but the artistic level. The stories are linked by a lord of some sort walking his dogs across a landscape and setting one loose on a person periodically. This leads into an abstract animated piece with narration which then leads into the stories. The first story is from Charles Burns and it plays like a Charles Burns story, with a guy finding a weird bug that gets loose as he is picked up by a possessive girl.Another story is a manga or anime like tale of a little girl who is being tormented. The third is about a a monster on the loose and the final one concerns a man who breaks into a house.(I think I missed a very short one, but frankly its no loss). None of the stories are really scary or creepy (Maybe the Burns piece is the best because of the unease of the interpersonal relationships.) Worse they are all the sort of tales that we've seen before, mores so if you love short horror fiction be it books, TV films or radio. What works here is the art which at times seems more like fine etchings or story illustrations come to life. it beautiful stuff (the exception being the Charles Burns stuff which looks like everything he's ever done). Worth a look only if you like animation as art, and even then I'd wait for a rental.(I had such high hopes)

Sometimes when I write comments, especially when I stray away from the overall or say average voting, I know people will automatically "not like" my comment or find it useful. Still as in this case, I'll explain my rating to those who care to read.We have a few really good animated short movies here (each with a different visual style/theme). If I had watched them as standalone stories, I would have rated them much higher. Or at least without the intermission animated story, which didn't have anything to do with any of the stories (apart from the fact that it was animated and could be categorized as horror, if you want to). But even the intermission shorts (which isn't even surprising, you can see where it's headed, which is boring and annoying at the same time), are not even close to achieve the status an intermission voice has.A female speaker speaks ... well french (duh), but again adds nothing much to the stories we are watching. Even more disturbing, it seems this voice-over is plain preposterous and pseudo philosophical. It drifts into conversations you might have with yourself in front of the mirror or when you are alone, but never want anyone else to hear say them (especially if you don't even have those "akward" conversations with yourself). This voice(-over) alone deserves a 1/10, but since the shorts are very good (and deserve the 7/10 rating the overall movie has), I settled for a 3/10