In America there’s ‘The
Amityville Horror’... in the U.K. there is ‘the dark’...
Mon Mar 06, 2006 The
Manila Bulletin
A grief-stricken family, a tragedy-haunted
house on the cliffs of Wales and a small town’s secret history.
In an attempt to pull her family together,
New Yorker Adele Tullian travels with her daughter Sarah to Anglesey,
Wales in the U.K. to visit her contractor father - James Tullian.
The morning after they arrive, Sarah
mysteriously vanishes. While the parents desperately search for
Sarah, a guilt-ridden Adele is haunted by visions of her daughter
as though she is trapped somewhere inside the haunted house.
Adele soon learns of an ancient local legend of a place called
The Dark - an ethereal land of the dead - and she becomes convinced
that Sarah is communicating to her from The Dark.
Not long after Sarah disappears, Adele
and James find themselves involved with a girl who not only bears
a striking resemblance to their missing daughter, but reveals
that she has retuned from the dead to inform them on how to get
Sarah back. They must follow the rule: ‘One of the living,
for one of the dead. The living must be sacrificed so that the
dead can return. Townsfolk suspect that the Tullians are succumbing
to the legacy of madness and murder that overwhelmed the house’s
previous tenants.'
How far would you go to save the life
of a loved one?
Would you go into the very jaws of death
itself?
For that’s where distraught Adelle
goes to rescue her daughter – who is trapped inside a haunted
place.
In this ominous netherworld your worst
fears becomes a reality.
What will you see in The Dark?
Maria Bello and Sean Bean (The Lord
of the Rings, National Treasure) star in The Dark, a gripping
true ghost story about a series of mysterious circumstances that
befall a young family who move to the Welsh countryside, only
to discover their house and the farm has a bloody past…
GENESIS
"Three years ago I was sent a script,
loosely based on a haunting true ghost story that happened in
Wales," recalls producer Jeremy Bolt ( Alien Versus Predator)
"I was rather taken with it because
I felt the story has a similarity with what happened at AMYTIVILLE.
I’m a huge fan of the first Amytiville horror film. A haunted
house, unexplained disturbances that includes an interesting
look at the supernatural and religious beliefs of our times."
He said
Like the Amytiville ghost story, The
Dark also has a family in crisis, a supernatural evil in the
place where they live, former tenants who committed mass suicide.
The new tenants, the Tullian family
now live in a cliff-top farmhouse once owned by a man named Rowan,
head of the flock of worshippers who believed in the legend of
Annywn (pronounced Anoon). Annwyn was the pagan version of heaven
or hell, depending on whether you think you are a good or bad
person.
The Welsh myth of Annwyn is named after
the Celtic legend of a realm where all things are possible and
not bound by the constraints of time or space. It is the source
of all Celtic wisdom and the place where great deeds can be accomplished.
In Insular Brythonic mythology, Annwyn was an underworld region,
ruled by Arawn, or (much later) Gwynn ap Nudd. According to the
legend, God gave Gwynn control over the demons lest "this
world be destroyed." Originally, Annwyn was said to lie
so far to the west that not even Manawyddan ap Llyr, the sea
and weather god, had found it, for you could only reach Annwyn
by dying yourself. Later, however, it was said that Annwyn could
be entered by those still living, near Lundy Island and Glastonbury
Tor. In the Book of Taleisin is a 10th century poem called The
Spoils of Annwyn. It is about King Arthur and his knights travelling
through Annwyn, searching for a magical cauldron possessed by
nine women. Only seven knights survived the journey and this
fable has been attributed as the precursor of later Holy Grail
stories involving King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
The nine maidens related to actual groups of nine priestesses
in ancient Celtic society. Geoffrey of Monmouth told stories
of Morgan le Fay and eight other priestesses in his poem, Vita
Merlini, who lived on the Isle of Apples or Avalon. As a result
Avalon was often identified with Annwyn because it is a stylised
Anglicisation of the word.
Producer Bolt explains, "I loved
the profound texture of the use of Welsh legend to explain what
actually happened to the Tullian family. That one particular
place could co-exist as two essentially different ones in time,
like they were on top of one another but had completely diverse
looks and atmospheres. It was a new way at looking at ghosts
in my view. In the usual ghost story you see spirits haunting
houses that exist in the real world. But is that the way the
ghost sees it? Their environment could look so different in the
ghost world rather than the way it appears to the living. That
reinterpretation really excited me. You pass through a watery
portal, like Adelle in The Dark, and while you can recognise
your surroundings, it’s a warped, spookified and scary version
of what you are familiar with."