Dark Tale

Dark Was the Night (2015) is one I picked for Ms. Spenser, what I hoped would be a classic creature feature. We were satisfied.

It starts in a logging camp, with the foreman checking in each team, but finding one logger missing. When he goes looking, he only finds body parts. But he finds out why pretty quickly, and fatally.

We now move the nearby town of Maiden Woods (isn’t that the ancient term for a grove dedicated to the Virgin Goddess? Needs research). Sheriff Kevin Durant and his deputy Lukas Haas are visiting a local farmer and crank about his missing horse. He claims it was stolen, they figure it just got away. We get to meet some of the townsfolk, and learn that Durant is depressed and, when he picks up his kid from his estranged wife, separated. We later learn that he let their other son drown while he was supposed to be watching him. Hope that doesn’t count as a spoiler.

Anyway, his living son hears a monster in the backyard, but Durant doesn’t find anything - though he does hear it. The next morning, he finds odd tracks of a huge bipedal hoofed beast. In fact, everyone in town has found them.

So we follow the usual pattern of unusual wildlife behavior and people going missing, or turning up gruesomely dead. Actually, there isn’t as much of a body count as you might expect. Also, there isn’t as much of a Wendigo factor as we hoped. Got to love a good Wendigo story, but this isn’t it.

It all ends up with the survivors gathered in a difficult to defend church - even though the Sheriff works out of a brick townhall with barred windows. Oh well, if you want find out how it comes out, you’ll have to watch yourself. This didn’t break much new ground, but it did its job well, with a minimum of fuss or grossouts. Just good old-fashioned horror.