Trailer
Plot summary
In Darkness Falls, Maine, widow Matilda Dixon gives a gold coin to every child who loses a tooth, so the children call her the Tooth Fairy. A fire leaves her face disfigured and unable to bear light; she covers it with a white porcelain mask and goes out only at night. When two children go missing, the townspeople take her for a witch, pull off her mask, hold her face to the light and hang her. She curses them, and the children come home unharmed. Kyle Walsh loses his last baby tooth, wakes to find Matilda in his room and flees to the lit bathroom. His mother is killed, and police send Kyle to a psychiatric institution. Twelve years later, Caitlin Greene telephones him: her younger brother Michael refuses to sleep in the dark.
Cast
- Jenny Lovellas Nurse Alexandra
- Charlotte Roseas Marie Winchester (as Charlotte Rees)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Darkness Falls (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Steve Wang, who had done special effects for Predator, was first enlisted to design Matilda's appearance, creating a "winged and toothy" creature with actor Doug Jones performing the role in prosthetics, but early test screenings were unsatisfactory, the design was scrapped, and Stan Winston and Aaron Sims were hired to create an alternate one.
- Because the creature design changed during production, actress Emma Caulfield recalled that during her scenes with the antagonist she was often reacting to "nothing at all", as shots of Dixon were completed without the cast.
- Even though Wang's design was rejected, it was used as the model for an action figure created by McFarlane Toys, released in September 2002 as "The Tooth Fairy".
- Producer John Hegeman, who had helped design the highly successful marketing campaign for The Blair Witch Project, produced a faux documentary titled The Legend of Matilda Dixon, a tactic similarly employed on that film.
- Darkness Falls grew out of writer Joe Harris's own 2001 short film Tooth Fairy, and the feature was made as a co-production between the United States and Australia.
