William Malone roars back into action with “Fair-Haired Child.”  In what is essentially a small parable of a film, he’s found the right way to display his gifts as a director of dark vision.  The story’s simplicity allows Malone to focus on conjuring dread and his own peculiar visual style.

When I first started getting into horror movies, a few friends and I rented House on Haunted Hill.  It freaked the living hell out of me at the time.  I still admire its bathed-in-blood atmosphere and the way he managed to make the house a real living, breathing entity that felt genuinely foreboding.  I’m not the only person who likes it – genre fans generally consider it the best of Dark Castle’s series of films.  feardotcom, his most recent effort, was empty-headed, to be sure, but filmed with commanding style.

With “Fair-Haired Child,” he tells a quick, dirty story.  A young girl is taken hostage by a seemingly evil couple so that she can presumably be sacrificed to a creature in the basement.  While she suffers in the basement, she meets a poor mute boy who must write messages in the dust on the floor.  The two of them bond in an effort to ward off the titular “Fair-Haired Child,” while the two adults stand around and wring their hands for about half an hour.

How this plot resolves will probably not surprise too many people, especially those who have read Grimm’s Fairy Tales and their more contemporary equal, EC Comics.  Those stories were always puritan tales of sinners getting their just desserts, most often by soggy zombies who were always grasping at the sinners with decayed hands.  God I love those comics.

But anyway.  The “fair-haired child” who attacks them does so in the incarnation of a pretty effective pale-faced goober, one who lurches around, sputtering and stopping and speeding up and slowing down.  The rhythm of its movement keeps things in the episode off-kilter, as does the way the basement environment seems bigger than it should be.  It contrasts nicely that the two children in the grungy basement care more for each other than the couple above them in the lavish, warmly-lit mansion.

The actors are all fine in their roles, especially Lindsay Pulsipher as Tara, but this isn’t really a showcase for the actors.  The characters are intentionally simple, and they exist so that the viewer can make a moral observation.  As the story reaches its conclusion, there are two or three sizeable twists.  Genre fans will see them coming (except one graphic exception), but they’re still satisfying, because they’re appropriate to the story, and they further the message.

If you simply want a hardcore, push-the-envelope horror flick, there are plenty of horrors out there trying to do that right now.  But I dug the style of the film, and the way it’s a simple, straightforward tale.  There are shades of Clive Barker in here, along with a dash of Poe and a generous helping of the Cryptkeeper.  The quality of Masters of Horror is starting to get a bit irritating – how can people trust my opinion when I’m praising almost every episode?

Checkout our review of Episode One: Don Coscarelli's  Incident On and Off a Mountain Road

Checkout our review of Episode Two: Stuart Gordon's H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House

Checkout our review of Episode Three: Tobe Hooper's Dance of the Dead

Checkout our review of Episode Four: Dario Argento's Jenifer

Checkout our review of Episode Five: Mick Garris's Chocolate

Checkout our review of Episode Six: Joe Dante's Homecoming

Checkout our review of Episode Seven: John Landis' Deer Woman

Checkout our review of Episode Eight: John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns