A suburban family unearth ancient demons while camping at the Grand Canyon in director Greg McLean's putrid and fright-less horror atrocity, The Darkness. An autistic young boy named Mikey Taylor (David Mazouz) stumbles upon a Native American burial ground during said trip, and takes five sacred stones home with him. The malevolent spirits of the dead live inside these rocks (we think?), and Mikey becomes the shepherd who will bring them back into the world. He starts referencing an imaginary friend named "Jenny," a figure whose identity is never discussed or explained or even questioned by his oblivious parents (Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell) or angsty older sister (Lucy Fry). Soon enough, Mikey is acting up as inexplicable events begin to occur around his home, prompting his family to call in a "healer" to rid the house of spirits.
The Darkness is as unimaginative as its title would suggest -- every single element of the movie is rehashed from better horror flicks. McLean torments us with attempted jump scares, cheap CGI, and witless folklore, all backed by a cartoonishly ominous score. And there needs to be a filmmaking law banning any scene in which a character watches a video on /YouTube as a means of filling in backstory; it's the laziest trick in the book to provide exposition via frantic /Google searches and "shocking" revelations on the Internet. What on earth could have motivated Bacon and Mitchell to sign on to this?
There isn't one genuine scare in the entire film. The plot is so thin and the action so sparse that the majority of The Darkness is spent exploring this family's inconsequential problems. It exploits autism, anorexia, and alcoholism for half-baked story filler, none of which has anything to do with a bunch of pissed-off Native Americans trying to hack their way back into the world of the living. It's difficult to even call this interminable mess of a movie forgettable, if only because it's so remarkably bad by just about every metric by which it could be judged. The Darkness is a punishing slog made up of every bad horror cliché of the last 20 years, and this reviewer implores you not to see it.