So, I was really bored and decided to go slumming on Amazon Prime the other night and i cam e across an unexpected find: DARK WAS THE NIGHT (2015). A horror movie I never heard of about a town increasingly terrorized by a Mysterious Creature from The Woods. Exactly the kind of thing I was interested in.

Folks, this movie did — ALMOST — everything right. In fact, I would say that if you want to make this movie better, the ONLY thing you have to do is turn it off just when the sheriff and the deputy look down at the ocrpse of The Creature. I will explain why in a moment, but since that would contain Spoilers, I’m going to save it for last.

This movie really does characters well. I liked all of the characters. It centers around the Sheriff’s family, which is in a terrible situation. They lost a child, to one of those accidents that could happen to anyone, leaving the Sheriff with a load of guilt for having allowed his son to die. He and his wife are on the brink of divorce, and their surviving son is understandably upset.

What’s awesome is how the writers handled this. In fact, this is what I would say Christian fiction OUGHT to look like, and seldom does. There’s no overt faith message here. The mother quietly turns to her church, which is quietly supportive and offers to help the sheriff, too. Everyone in the film is flawed and hurting, and over the course of the film, you see them choose the hard roads of healing and forgiveness and helping each other out, even as the outside threat stalks the town. The climactic scene, in which the Sheriff and his deputy hunt and are hunted by The Creature — a cryotid who probably is the source of the Wendigo legends — is very well done.

But then… oh, THEN… the Cheap Shot. SPOILERS BELOW:

At the very end, when the whole cast we’ve emotionally invested in is celebrating their survival, the deputy notices that the dead creature doesn’t have a shotgun wound where the deputy shotgunned it. And we cut to outside the church, where well over a DOZEN more of these creatures are crawling everywhere.

That, my friends, is SHITTY writing. It’s a Cheap Shot (which I strongly suspect was added by some producer-level idiot because He Read Uh Book Once on Horror Writing and There Has To Be A Gotcha. At least, I hope so) that totally shits on all the character development and tension that has been built up. No one is saved, and they’re all minutes from death.

The hell of it is, if it had been just one or two more creatures bursting in and then getting taken out at the cost of a serious loss to the protagonists, THAT would have been good. I halfway SUSPECTED there was more than one creature. But a dozen just undercuts everything the movie established, and it’s REALLY cheap. Don’t do this.