Guillermo del Toro’s remake of the well-remembered seventies TV-movie chiller about a woman who discovers mysterious creatures are living in her old house was made in 2010, but because of Miramax’s money troubles it’s been sitting on the shelf for a year. More often than not, these cinematic orphans sputter toward their inevitable release, earning a token weekend, then off to DVD and Netflix, but in this case, the result is a ferocious, deliciously spooky chiller, destined for sleeper status and ready to shred its bloated summer competition.

The original Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark starred Kim Darby and was directed by the all-but-forgotten television auteur John Newland, who once competed with Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone with his anthology show One Step Beyond. The TV movie had weird little whispering ghouls trying to drag poor Darby down into the basement while her oblivious husband put the whole thing down to a case of nerves. Like many telefilms of the period, the original was shot on a nothing budget, but its inherently creepy story gimmick and a nice use of shadowy photography made it unforgettably terrifying if you were an impressionable kid.

You’d expect a remake to be more graphic and in some ways del Toro’s version is, but it’s also smarter, scarier and more emotionally involving. That may surprise potential viewers who might reasonably be expected to prefer sitting through an hour of Kim Darby (who recently suffered from unfortunate comparisons to Hailee Steinfeld in the Coen Bros. True Grit, the other Kim Darby movie remade in 2010) to two hours of Mrs. Tom Cruise. The good news is that a) Katie Holmes is exceptional in the movie and b) she’s not the real star.

Del Toro wisely repositions this movie’s heroine as a young girl: Sally Hirst, played by Bailee Madison. Sally has just been handed off from one divorced parent to another, in this case to her father Alex (Guy Pearce), who has used all of his capital to purchase an amazing old mansion in the hopes of getting the fixer-upper on the cover of Architectural Digest. His interior designer and girlfriend is Kim (Holmes) who has the unfortunate task of getting the miserable Sally to like her.

Guillermo del Toro wrote the screenplay for the film (with another old pro, Matthew Robbins) and produced it, and he quickly adds his own idiosyncratic ingredients to the mix: a grisly Lovecraftian flashback that establishes the mansion as having been once owned by an Audubon-like nature artist named Emerson Blackwood (Gary McDonald), and a subsequent mythology for the creatures that soon begin to pursue and terrorize Sally. Switching the protagonist from an adult (albeit childlike) woman to a child gives the film’s early scenes a magical, Pan’s Labyrinth quality, and more importantly it adds a helpful extra layer of skepticism to the mix. Sally’s outbursts about little creatures in the house are attributed at first to childhood imagination, and then to the psychological stresses of divorce. Holmes’s character starts off as an uncomfortable bystander but she gradually begins to take Sally’s side—unfortunately Pearce’s social-climbing character is just as thick-headed and misguided as Jim Hutton was in the original TV-movie.

Bailee Madison is quite good as Sally—she seems real, her face often pinched into an ugly pout of unhappiness. Holmes starts off on an odd footing, looking and acting uncannily like her infamous husband right down to her line deliveries. When a psychologist comes in to examine Sally and suggests stronger medications, Holmes looks stricken, and you start thinking the whole thing’s going to turn into a scientology tract. But she makes a believable ally for Sally, and Madison’s own tenacity and defiance in the face of a horde of rat-like, devilish ghouls earns some well-deserved cheers.

Directed with a strong sense of forboding and style by newcomer Troy Nixey, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is sparing of its scares, carefully setting up its premise and offering only fleeting glimpses of the mansion’s tiny denizens. When the mayhem finally ensues, the tension and suspense are wound to teeth-chattering levels, fully earning its satisfying climax.

It’s oddly faithful to the original film, right down to a dinner party scene where the guests chatter blindly away while Sally fights a vicious battle with one of the creatures right under the dining room table. Once the little beasts launch their climactic assault it’s downright nail-biting stuff, with a traumatic final sacrifice and a wicked characterization of the ghouls, which speak in insinuating whispers that develop into hair-raising shrieks when they’re angered.

CG creatures have long been derided as the death of horror, but del Toro (and protégé director Troy Nixey) really know how to take the curse off them. Ordinary household objects (a Polaroid camera, a razor, a mallet and a wicked long needle) become terrifying tools and weapons in the war between Sally and the creatures and the sheer hatefulness of the little beasts has you quickly rooting for the humans to stomp them flat and sticky.

Despite its minor missteps, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark obliterates an entire a decade of dreary torture porn, homemade handheld spookfests and misguided rehashes of Jason, Freddy and Leatherface, and takes its place as the first genuine horror classic of the new decade, hopefully setting the misbegotten horror genre on a fresh new path.

If del Toro can’t give us his Mountains of Madness, this will do very nicely.

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