Does this remind you of something?

Skim over "Donner's" review of the movie Darkness and see if its nuclear family seems familiar to you. There's the father, who immediately starts going wacko when confronted by the supernatural, the son who also gets confronted by the supernatural but deals with it, the mother who just keeps on mothering pretending nothing is wrong, and the smarter daughter who suspects something, but nobody listens to her.

I guessed that this was a live-action version of a Simpson's Tree House of Horror special (with the absence of Maggie and a few other minor changes). Another possibility is that this was an attempt to cash in on the "wierd little boy" phenomenon of The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, and The Ring. Or it could be a pastiche of various successful horror flicks of the past: Donner suggests The Amityville Horror while Bill DeLapp in the Syracuse New Times suggests a mixture of The Shining with "Malcolm in the Middle".