Movie Review: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark *** ½ / *****

Directed by: André Øvredal.

Written by: Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman and Guillermo del Toro and Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton based on the novel by Alvin Schwartz.

Starring: Zoe Margaret Colletti (Stella Nicholls), Michael Garza (Ramón Morales), Gabriel Rush (Auggie Hilderbrandt), Dean Norris (Roy Nicholls), Gil Bellows (Chief Turner), Lorraine Toussaint (Lou Lou), Austin Zajur (Chuck Steinberg), Natalie Ganzhorn (Ruth), Austin Abrams (Tommy), Kathleen Pollard (Sarah Bellows).

 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark gets the spirit and tone of its horror just right. This really isn’t a horror movie for hardcore horror fans – for fans who want to be truly terrified, or watch something with wall-to-wall gore. This is a horror movie really aimed at the younger set – something that would be perfect for sleepovers full of 10-year-olds, who can laugh and be scared all at the same time by this effective collective of horror movie clichés, done very well by director André Øvredal. I do find it a little odd that the film decided that 1968 was the right setting for this movie aimed at younger viewers in 2019, and also that they’ve made a movie that is probably too scary for younger kids, and not scary enough for older ones. Its kind in no man’s land demographically when you try to figure out who they made this for. Then again, it worked very effectively on me, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

 

Anyway, it’s Halloween in small town America in 1968. A trio of teenage nerds – Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Chuck (Austin Zajur) and Auggie (Gabriel Rush) are determined to get back at their high school bully Tommy (Austin Abrams) – in a prank that involves feces. This leads to a chase that brings them all to the local drive-in where Ramon (Michael Garza), a Mexican American teenager just passing through, saves the trio of nerds (he takes a liking to Stella) – and later leads them all to the towns haunted house (every small town American town has one). Stella, not realizing she is a horror movie, takes the book that belonged to Sarah Bellows – who loves to tell stories to children before those children disappeared forever or so the legend goes. And then that book starts writing new stories – each featuring one of the teenagers who were in that house that night.

 

The film is based on the series of books by Alvin Schwartz, published between 1981 and 1991, which were just a collection of short stories, meant to scare children (they succeeded). The movie, therefore, is also a series of stories meant to scare children – and it will probably succeed as well. All the stuff about the teenagers and the haunted house, etc. is a framing device to get to those short stories. It’s in those short stories that Øvredal really shines as a director – building the tension in each one before it becomes overwhelming. All of the short stories work – none better than The Dream, which features Chuck and the long hallways of a hospital bathed in red light – and an unstoppable woman moving slowly towards him from all sides. It’s a masterful little piece of horror filmmaking (as it The Red Spot, featuring Chuck’s sister).

 

The framing device is a necessary evil in many ways – and while Øvredal clearly doesn’t quite relish it as much as those small stories, he still does it well. Part of this is owed to Colletti, an appealing lead, who does more than she really should be able to under all the clichés she has to play. Some of it is because of the period detail – which doesn’t overload on the period detail, but does get it right. Some of it is that the screenplay tries to deal with the politics and racism of the time – and even if it doesn’t quite work, the effort is genuine.

 

The film is well-made by Øvredal – whose previous films (Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) I somehow missed, but I am interested in seeing. It’s clear that part of the vision of the film is from its producer – Guillermo Del Toro. This is the type of film Del Toro would have directed before he won a pair of Oscars for The Shape of Waters – now he produces them for others.

 

I’m not sure if Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark is the type of film that will find its audience in theaters – its ideal audience is probably a little younger than the American PG-13 rating suggests. But they’ll find it – they watch it on Netflix when their parents aren’t looking. They’ll watch it at sleepovers, when their parents pretend not to know what they’re watching. For some of them, the images will haunt them like images from Child’s Play haunt my horror movie hating wife, who saw that film at a sleepover as a kid, and refuses to watch horror movies to this day. But for some of them, this is the ideal way to introduce horror movies to them.