It’s got to get dark before it gets light

Ny times news service, Los Angeles

The Spiderwick Chronicles is the latest series of children’s fantasy books to make it to the big screen.

The movie version, however, isn’t exactly kid stuff.

Packed with goblins, ogres, trolls and the like, the film condenses four of DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s five books into an exciting — but often frightening and kind of gory — war between a troubled young family and evil forces from the Unseen World.

“This film is quite scary, and I think kids will like that,” says Freddie Highmore, the 16-year-old English actor who plays the twin American brothers, Jared and Simon Grace, who find their new country home besieged by monsters. “They like getting scared to death.”

Probably true. Their parents, maybe not so much. Nevertheless, making the PG-rated film as mature as possible — in thematic as well as graphic terms — was a calculated decision.

“When Paramount brought me in, they asked me to age it up a little bit and intensify it,” notes producer-writer Karey Kirkpatrick (Over the Hedge, Charlotte’s Web), who wrote the final script for Spiderwick after several other writers took cracks at it. “They were realizing that if you put this many CG characters in a movie, it’s going to bring on a certain price tag and you don’t want to limit the casting of your net. The script that was in existence potentially reached too small of a market, so they figured it was OK to make it a bigger adventure and a little more intense.”

In other words, not just for little kids.

“It’s not a G-rated movie, it’s a PG-rated movie,” adds another one of the film’s many producers, Mark Canton. “We approached the making of the movie specifically to have some edge and to cross over. We’ve seen the world of Harry Potter get more and more mature — almost R-rated, right?

“But since I think PG is the right rating for us, there’s a responsibility factor, too,” Canton continues. “During the preview process, we had almost no complaint from a parent in terms of the violence or anything else. Somehow, the third act is very gratifying in terms of reconnecting this dysfunctional family.”

Indeed, Spiderwick is as much a story about repairing damaged families as it is about hobgoblins. Angry Jared and introverted Simon move to the weird old family estate with their mother (Mary-Louise Parker) and impatient older sister Mallory (Irish actress Sarah Bolger) because their father has left for another woman. The back story involving turn-of-the-last-century naturalist Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) and his institutionalized, now elderly daughter Lucinda (Joan Plowright) also involves strained parent-child relations.

“We engineered this thing to be a completely sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat ride of an entertainment,” the movie’s director, Mark Waters (Mean Girls), acknowledges. “And then you hope, on a secondary level, kids get a sense of the importance of family and how the people who are closest to you are the people that you get angry with but, in the end, must rely on.”

“I brought in this notion that Jared sees the world a certain way and vilifies his mother,” writer Kirkpatrick confirms. “And it’s through the process of seeing the unseen that his eyes open to see what’s going on in his family.”

Thoughtful enough. But how do these new emphases sit with the Spiderwick creators?