Darkness Falls

Darkness Falls (2003)

An eye for an eye. Your life for a tooth.

A vengeful spirit has taken the form of the Tooth Fairy to exact vengeance on the town that lynched her 150 years earlier. Her only opposition is the only child, now grown up, who has survived her before.

Date of release
2003-01-24
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (692)
Runtime
1h 26m
Genres
Thriller, Horror
Director
Jonathan Liebesman

Casting

Interesting facts

Darkness Falls is a 2003 supernatural horror film directed by Jonathan Liebesman, in his feature directorial debut. The script was written by Joe Harris, James Vanderbilt and John Fasano. It is an international co-production between the United States and Australia. Chaney Kley and Emma Caulfield are featured actors, with supporting performances from Sullivan Stapleton, Emily Browning, Lee Cormie, Grant Piro, Kestie Morassi, and Angus Sampson.

Production

In September 2001, the film was announced as having entered development under the working titles of Don't Peek and The Tooth Fairy as the first production of the Revolution Studios based Distant Corners Entertainment Group, which itself was expanded from a 2001 short film Tooth Fairy written and directed by Joe Harris.

Filming was slated to begin in November 2001 with production in Australia on a $6–8 million budget. Jonathan Liebesman was announced as director in what would be his debut feature. Producer John Hegeman, who was behind the marketing of The Blair Witch Project, voiced his hopes that the film would be the first in a wide reaching franchise. Principal photography occurred in Sydney, New South Wales as well as Yarraville and Melbourne, Victoria.

Special effects for Matilda Dixon's appearance underwent significant changes during production and after. Steve Wang, who had previously completed special effects for Predator (1987), was initially enlisted to design Matilda's appearance, creating a "winged and toothy" creature with actor Doug Jones performing the role in prosthetics.

The final design, a life-size puppet as seen in the finished film, is entirely Winston and Sims's creation. Despite this, Wang's original design for Dixon was used as the model for an action figure created by McFarlane Toys, released in September 2002 as "The Tooth Fairy." Due to the change in creature design during production, actress Emma Caulfield recalled that, during her scenes with the antagonist, she was often reacting to "nothing at all,"…

Initially, the film was to have established Kyle Walsh as more explicitly troubled while keeping the actual existence of the Tooth Fairy vague and undefined in order to make audiences question whether Kyle was in fact the actual killer. Matilda Dixon was also established as being a younger widow with a husband who was lost at sea rather than an older woman as depicted in the final film.

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