There’s plenty to be afraid of in Troy Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Sure, there are a few unintentional laugh-worthy moments and some pretty big gaps in logic, but if you can turn the dial on your brain to “non-skeptical” for a few hours you will find something genuinely spooky.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark follows a young girl named Sally (Bailee Madison) as she makes the move from her mother’s home in Los Angeles to her father Alex’s (Guy Pearce) project estate in Rhode Island. We get a freaky glimpse into the house’s history during the first ten minutes of the film when we watch the estate’s former owner tear out his housekeeper’s teeth in order to feed them to the mysterious whispering voices behind the grate in his basement.

Yeah. He tore out his and his housekeeper’s teeth to feed them to the voices in his basement. Ordontophobics may need to skip this feature.

After the jarring first few minutes, we are introduced to Sally and her struggle to deal with her father’s new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes)who is also Alex’s partner in real estate entrepreneurship. It isn’t long before Sally discovers the long since sealed off basement of the estate and her father seems more than eager to tear down some walls to unearth a piece of the manor’s history.

I won’t ruin the whole movie for you, but Sally eventually unleashes the light-fearing creatures behind the grate in the basement after they whisper a series of terrifying things to her ( “your parents don’t love you” and “come play with us forever” were definitely among the phrases uttered) and the nightmare begins.

The whole film is shot beautifully so even if you don’t necessarily appreciate the timeless tale of a girl who can’t adjust to her father’s new girlfriend and deals with it by unleashing a hoard of tooth-hungry gnome-fairies, then you’ll at least have something gorgeous in the frame to set your eyes on for two hours.

The direction by Troy Nixey (don’t be fooled by the advertisements that plaster Guillermo Del Toro’s name on this thing, he is just a producer) is smooth, fluid and is only occasionally punctuated by the poor choice of showing the creatures over and over again.

The design of the fairies is pretty terrifying in itself, but they aren’t what make this movie frightening. There are dozens of the creatures in the film and they are frequently shown scurrying about in all their wingless, hairy, hunchbacked glory. All of the “this is meant to scare me but it only made me LOL” moments involve extreme close-ups of the creatures, and oh yeah, they can speak English.

It’s one thing to have a creepy disembodied voice whispering hushed ideas into your ear and quite another to have an ugly, five inch tall CGI fairy-gnome speaking to you in a non-regional American dialect.

Scenes where you only see a portion of the creatures, or when you just hear them, or when you know they’re in the room and you’re just waiting for them to stick a razor into someone’s ear prove to be the most genuinely scary moments, and there are enough of these scenes in the film to make anyone clench the cup-holders on their theater seat.

The tension relaxes when the camera focuses on one of their little computer generated faces and we’re reminded that they were added in post-production.

To the movie’s credit, I was expecting a fair share of jump-scares and although there are a good amount of them they don’t distract from the overall spookiness and atmospheric unease that the film effectively places the audience in.

Madison portrays Sally admirably and with more truthfulness and reality than one can expect from a child cast in an R-rated movie about a set of demented tooth-fairies. Several scenes where her character suffers from an emotional breakdown had me convinced that her character was real even if the overall actions of the character read paper thin.

Here’s where the lapses in logic come into play. I won’t get specific because it would effectively ruin the film, but if a foreign lump appeared at the foot of your bed would you get under the covers and crawl toward it? I thought not. If your girlfriend told you that the last person that owned the house you’re staying in started painting freaky pictures of fairy-gnomes (you know, the same one your child has been describing to you) a few days before he disappeared, would you wave it off with a shrug?

I can understand that intentionally dense characters are a trademark of horror movies (“Don’t go in there! Why would you go in there?!”), but at some point in this film every character displays some sign of outward buffoonery that puts everyone in danger. Also, for all the racket that these creatures make, no adults ever seem to hear them.

The film operates on the “this can’t be real, the kid is just making it up to get attention” cliche and although it works for most of the film, the labor that it takes to uphold the illusion gets strained from time to time. The film goes out of its way to annoyingly assure the audience that the adults never see head nor tail of the creatures even though they are all over the house one hundred percent of the time.

At the end of the day, the film was creepy enough to satiate my appetite for a good scare and at several points I found myself clenching my teeth in suspense. It isn’t a film that will stick with me every night like a good horror movie does, but it is sure to give at least some people plenty of reasons to be afraid of the dark.