Dark Skies (2013)
Directed by Scott Stewart
From the producers of Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Sinister comes Dark Skies: a supernatural thriller that follows a young family living in the suburbs. As husband and wife Daniel and Lacey Barret witness an escalating series of disturbing events involving their family, their safe and peaceful home quickly unravels. When it becomes clear that the Barret family is being targeted by an unimaginably terrifying and deadly force, Daniel and Lacey take matters in their own hands to solve the mystery of what is after their family.
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3 films that influenced Dark Skies
What critics say influenced Dark Skies
The basic plot is pretty much a direct rip-off of the classic suburban ghost story " Poltergeist " (1982), and there are also elements obviously poached from the likes of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 and 1978), " Signs " (2002), "Paranormal Activity" (2007) and countless other titles.
We're reminded of one superior movie ("Poltergeist"), then another ("Paranormal Activity"), and another ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind").
Stewart borrows liberally from two schools of horror: the classic Poltergeist / Close Encounters era and the more current Paranormal Activity films to craft a horror that somewhat resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone .
Daniel and Lacey can only manage confusion, and solutions borrowed from “Paranormal Activity” (surveillance cameras), “Night of the Living Dead” (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie (Internet searches, where “The Truth,” or at least “The Conspiracy is Out There”).
Where Legion and Priest attempted to offer the sort of action/horror blockbuster experience of a Resident Evil flick (low-hanging fruit…), Dark Skies instead takes the sci-fi premise of an alien abduction story and conveys it in the crescendo format of Paranormal Activity and all its many copycats within the found-footage horror (not so coincidentally, the movie is produced by the makers of PA, Sinister, Insidious, etc…).
Nothing coming after quite tops it in a film that borrows liberally from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, Signs, and even The Birds.
It is a terrible shame that the movie now must carry with it a negative stigma because it's a whole lot better than that, earning the right through its very intelligence and air-tight grasp of informed genre filmmaking to be uttered in the same breath as 1993's "Fire in the Sky" and 2002's " Signs ."
Maybe it’s because the aliens’ motives don’t feel real, or maybe it’s the way the film was shot, but at the end of the day you may as well go watch Fire In The Sky on Netflix and see what a real scary alien movie is all about.
It is a terrible shame that the movie now must carry with it a negative stigma because it's a whole lot better than that, earning the right through its very intelligence and air-tight grasp of informed genre filmmaking to be uttered in the same breath as 1993's "Fire in the Sky" and 2002's " Signs ."
The basic plot is pretty much a direct rip-off of the classic suburban ghost story " Poltergeist " (1982), and there are also elements obviously poached from the likes of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 and 1978), " Signs " (2002), "Paranormal Activity" (2007) and countless other titles.