A black and white, animated anthology film that draws on the talents of an unusual mix of well-known comics artists and graphic designers, Fear(s) of the Dark is the trippiest cross between a European art-house curio and a thrill-crazed midnight movie since the heady days of Fantastic Planet. As usual with omnibus features, the stories vary in quality, but the shifts from one striking visual style to the next will keep your eyes glued to the screen--unless you turn your head away from the grislier moments, notably the recurring episodes, captured in compellingly scratchy-looking artwork from Christian Hincker (the artist known as "Blutch"), in which a wild-eyed, cadaverous-looking nobleman terrorizes the streets with a pack of vicious dogs. There are also full segments from a pair of giants in the comic book world, Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattiotti, both making their first forays into film animation (though Burns once adapted his "Dogboy" character for a bizarre, stylized live action serial that ran on MTV's old animation showcase Liquid Television.) Mattotti's brief segment is a beauty, a sophisticated rendition of a folk tale that seems to carve out its own quiet, eerie space at the heart of the feature. Burns's segment is lively enough and supplies the movie's only traces of humor, but it might seem most impressive to people who haven't seen a lot of Burns's work and so haven't already been well-exposed to his retroland style and obsessions with virginal sexual terror. (It'll be easy to tell which reviewers of Fear(s) of the Dark are new to Burns; they'll be the one whose first thought is to compare his segment to David Cronenberg.)
As a whole, Fear(s) has the experimental feel of people trying things out in somebody else's laboratory and hoping that the results will mesh. A minor work that draws on some major talents, it seldom achieves anything like the obsessive charge that some of these artists have been able to generate with their work on the printed page. It's probably of greatest interest to comics geeks who'll get a tingle from seeing some of their favorites working on film, and horror addicts intrigued by the fresh angle it provides on some classic tropes of the genre. Members of both groups will be gratified to discover that the movie ends with a knockout punch supplied by director Richard McGuire. It's the simplest and most basic of scare movie set-ups: a nameless man lost in a snowstorm at night discovers an empty-or-is-it? cabin and beds down for the night. Virtually wordless and depicted in chunky black and white images, with the the protagonist's face and hands jutting out of the inky darkness of the unlit house, it's an elegant formal exercise that actually manages to get your heart racing a little. For twenty minutes or so, in theaters playing Fear(s) of the Dark, it'll really feel like Halloween.