Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

From the Dark Blu-ray Movie Review

The Creature from the Black Irish Bog

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 15, 2015

As a kid, Irish writer/director Conor McMahon loved Peter Jackson's Bad Taste and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2. As a result, his first films were horror comedies like Stitches, which involved a homicidal clown who returned from the dead to settle old scores (the very description is comical). In his fourth feature, however, McMahon wanted to try a straight horror film. The 2014 thriller, From the Dark, is traditional creature feature about a couple stranded in the countryside who find themselves fighting off a supernatural attacker of unknown origin. The plot is classic, and the execution reflects an intimate knowledge of horror tropes, but the final product feels like a short film stretched out to feature length.

In the great tradition of modern horror films, From the Dark opens with a "teaser" of the trouble to come that is, in many respects, the film's best sequence. On the moors in County Offaly, Ireland, an old farmer (Gerry O'Brien) is digging out blocks of peat using traditional tools. It's a quaint setting that suggests McMahon's film will be uniquely Irish. Suddenly the farmer hits something solid and pulls up a stake. His digging appears to have opened a burial chamber. Night is approaching. Things do not turn out well.

The film then rewinds to earlier that day, having now established the general theme of vampirism. In McMahon's conception, however, the vampire is a primitive, feral creature—he refers to it as a "bog monster"—who lives to hunt and operates on instinct. In a curious choice, McMahon's script establishes "rules" for vampire behavior and weaknesses that vary significantly from traditional lore, but the human characters don't seem to notice. It's as if they've never seen a vampire movie (or, for that matter, a zombie film, because the bog monster also shares key traits with those other horror standbys).

Sarah (Niamh Algar) and Mark (Stephen Cromwell) are driving from Dublin to a weekend vacation in the country. They're an established couple who have been together long enough to discuss marriage, but Mark expresses the traditional male reluctance to be tied down by a legal commitment. Shortly, though, the couple has a more immediate problem, when their car gets stuck in the mud in a remote location with no cell reception. Mark walks to a nearby farmhouse that seems almost alive, as the motion detectors flip on the outdoor floodlights. Inside he finds the farmer from the opening teaser, semi-conscious with odd neck wounds. Mark decides that he and Sarah have to help the man—and here, too, it's as if he'd never seen a horror film. By the time Mark returns to the farmhouse with Sarah, the farmer has changed into . . . well, something else.

The second half of From the Dark becomes a claustrophobic siege, as Mark and Sarah try to evade, first, the farmer, and then the creature (Ged Murray) that "turned" him. Light, in any form, is the most effective weapon, but it's not easy to keep anything lit in the pitch black of the country night, when your adversary keeps destroying everything that generates the slightest illumination. McMahon and his cinematographer do some clever tricks with barely imperceptible movements in darkness, but there's only so much one can accomplish with just two characters and a limited number of adversaries. By the time the battle breaks out of the farmhouse and onto the open moor, the tension has evaporated, and the picture has long since gone slack.

From the Dark Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

From the Dark was shot on the Red Epic by Michael Lavelle, who was part of the crew on McMahon's Stitches. The camera was selected after testing several digital models for their ability to capture dark images without introducing noise or "graininess", especially in active, handheld shots. MPI Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which was presumably sourced from digital files, presents a sharply detailed and clear image in the early daylight scenes, when the picturesque countryside provides a unique but oddly disquieting background for both the "teaser" opening and the beginning of Sarah and Mark's road trip. When night falls, the image becomes very dark, and good calibration of one's display is essential, because creatures in the night are often just a different shade of black from the surrounding darkness. As the action shifts to the farmhouse, the action is often deliberately confusing, and the shots are close and handheld, but the image itself remains stable. Colors are mostly dull earth tones, with an occasional wash of something rich and distinctive, such as the red of blood or the blue of the sky as dawn approaches. (The bright green of the Irish countryside appears only briefly in the opening scenes, before night erases it.)

MPI has encoded From the Dark on a BD-50 with a high bitrate of 30.00 Mbps, which is a welcome change from the common approach of tight compression with digitally acquired films.

From the Dark Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

From the Dark's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, offers a fine mix of environmental sounds on the moor and plenty of creaking, rattling, footsteps, crashes and various sounds of appliances and other household objects once Sarah and Mark reach the farm. A tractor generates some memorable sonics, and of course the attacking creatures have their roars, screams, murmurs and heavy breathing. Dialogue, which is minimal after the initial introduction of Sarah and Mark, is clear and intelligible; subtitles are available for anyone who has difficulty with the Irish pronunciation. The tense score is by Ray Harman (whose many credits include the first two seasons of George Gently ).

As usual with MPI releases, an alternate PCM 2.0 track is included.

From the Dark Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Writer/Director/Producer Conor McMahon: McMahon provides a lively and engaging overview of his inspirations and influences, as well as the history of the project, which was financed by MPI's motion picture division. He discusses casting, choosing the location and the practical logistics of planning a low-budget shoot. He also describes the physical rigors of filming several scenes, in one of which he himself doubled for an actor.



• Behind the Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1; 20:59): This selection of footage from various locations shows the cast and crew at work on different parts of the film, including scenes with practical effects and creature prosthetics. It very clearly demonstrates that working on a low-budget horror film is not a luxury experience.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.85:1; 2:03): It's an effective if deceptive trailer, promising more action and suspense than the movie delivers.



• Additional Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Late Phases: Night of the Lone Wolf, VANish and Starry Eyes, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

From the Dark Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

McMahon is a thoughtful filmmaker with an obvious passion for the horror genre, but From the Dark doesn't add up to an effective whole, despite some interesting parts. MPI's Blu-ray is technically superior, so that anyone who is curious should not be disappointed by the presentation.