ulia (Regan) has an apparently idyllic life. She's only a few days away from completing her master's degree in abnormal psychology and is involved with a caring and sensitive paramedic, Paul (Blucas).
But things start to go wrong when she takes a frantic call from Billy (Jon Abrahams), a childhood friend who has fallen on hard times. She and Billy share a childhood trauma. They both experienced night terrors—bad dreams that took on the feel of reality, as if something evil were stalking them.
When Julia meets Billy in a dingy diner, Billy tells her that he's fearful that those night terrors weren't just dreams. He shows her a wound on his hand that hasn't healed, a mark he first got when he was a child. "That's when they marked us," he tells Julia. "And now they're back."
The traumatic meeting triggers a return of Julia's own sense of anxiety and panic. With Paul in the next room, Julia suddenly awakes to the ringing of the phone. On the other end, she hears only a skittering noise, then nothing. Sensing a presence in the apartment, she enters the bathroom and opens the medicine chest, where she catches a glimpse of something horrifying.
Later, Julia meets Billy's college friends, Sam (Embry) and Terry (Dominczyk), who are linked to both Billy and Julia by their own childhood night terrors.
After another frightening encounter, Julia turns to Paul, who has trouble understanding her rising panic. "There's a difference between what I've been through and what you're going through," he tells her. "Yours is in there"—pointing to her head—"And mine's out there. Don't get confused about
which is which."
Horror cliches don't always deliver
Wes Craven Presents: They brings director Harmon back into the horror film fold, 16 years after he first gained fame directing The Hitcher. It's not an auspicious return.
They begins with a good premise and contains a few scares, with appealing actors in the lead roles. But it must have seemed scarier on paper than it ultimately ends up being on screen, like a nightmare recalled in the light of dawn. Instead, They is a dreary, depressing exercise in
paranoia.
Harmon relies too heavily on mood, foreboding music and the threat of danger than on actual frights, and scene after scene plays out without much payoff. The same may be said of the entire film, whose dark ending leaves the viewer as unsettled as someone roused from slumber by the telephone's jangle.
Writer Hood clearly aims at crafting some kind of metaphor for the slide into mental illness or the potent grip fear can have on a decompensating mind. But that effort is perhaps too subtle for what is otherwise a routine horror-suspense movie, whose chills recall countless others. The exploration of Regan's character and her relationships is ultimately too sketchy and simply bogs down this otherwise brief film.
In place of true suspense, Harmon offers the viewer lots of flickering lights, rainy streets, dark hallways and obligatory shots from the point of view of whatever may or may not be stalking our hapless heroine. Cars never start, flashlights always go out, and people always leave the room promising to come
right back.
The young cast is appealing, but bland, particularly the waiflike Regan and the stalwart Blucas (best known as Riley Finn on TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Freakylinks' Embry offers a mildly amusing but abbreviated
turn as the blackly cynical artist.
