Dark Skies (2013)

title: Dark Skies
written & directed by: Scott Stewart
photography by: David Boyd
music by: Joseph Bishara
edited by: Peter Gvozdas
cast: Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo
imdb

Insidious and Sinister are two of the most interesting horror movies we have seen in the last years. Despite being the second one more predictable, both of them follow the path of psychological horror (which, I admit, it's my favourite) with a classical structure. This horror subgenre, that new generations may find slow and/or boring, usually uses horror to explore human emotions, and even sociological matters.

Dark Skies developes the subject of night visitors (people who claim that are/have been visited by presences during nighttime), and has some common points with The Fourth Kind (2009), despite being quite more solid than it.

It includes several homage images, the most obvious to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which, talking about this subject, is really not surprising, being Spielberg's film the greatest ever made about visitors from other worlds.

Dark Skies is well written and better directed. Maybe lacking of enduring images, but with a measured crescendo. You could arguee that the ending is predictable and disappointing, and that would be partially true; that's a recurring problem with horror movies, but rarely successfully overcome. We can't say that Dark Skies has the best ending but in some way it is the most logical and believable at that point.

Dark Skies may be another of a series of movies that, with the two referred and some other, try to find a different path from the one that seems to rule now: mockumentaries (The Frankenstein Theory) and movies-that-begin-with-a-girl-running-in-the-forest (Prowl, Acolytes). In this subgenre we can include examples that go from the acceptable (The Apparition) to the delightful (Red Lights).