Picture us around a campfire, a flashlight under my chin
It was Halloween night. 1968. Three high school friends, just like you, were running away from the local bully and hid in the old Bellows house on the outskirts of town. Sure, they’d heard the rumors that if you ask little Sarah Bellows to tell you a story, her ghostly voice would read to you from the hidden basement room. She’d been locked away her whole life, that is until she hung herself right there. But these kids were smart and didn’t believe silly scary stories. That is, until tonight.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark really does build itself like a classic tale to be told around the campfire or at a slumber party for kids to scare each other with. The concept is based on a series of “children’s” books from Gen-X’s childhood. Whether or not they were appropriate for children was hotly contested. Honestly just how 13-year-old-appropriate this PG-13 movie is, could be contested as well.
The books were just collections of very short scary stories (you could maybe tell. In the dark.) with no through-line. The movie adaptation comes up with a serviceable plot to tie them together. And they keep the emphasis on scary stories the whole time. Our main protagonist out of the group of misfits is an aspiring writer. Meanwhile the horrors come to life because the ghostly antagonist writes them in blood in a book. And the stories start including the names of the kids that visited the haunted house that fateful Halloween night.
The Actual Scary Story Part
The movie really picks up steam when it starts telling the scary stories. Fans of the books can know that we see versions of Harold, The Big Toe, The Red Spot, The Dream, and Me Tie Dough-ty Walker. There are also references to The Attic, The Wendigo, and we hear The Hearse Song throughout the movie, creepy in its own right and with lyrics worth looking up.
Even if you can’t quite remember the titles or details of the stories from when you last read the book in the ’80s, the visuals with bring them right back to mind. Stephen Gammell is the name of the illustrator that created nightmares. If Lord of the Rings is known for its lush world building and Deadpool is known for his crude and quick humor then Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is known for its illustrations. This is one thing they couldn’t afford to screw up (see The Hobbit trilogy and X-Men Origins: Wolverine).
Fortunately the scary visuals are a highlight of the film.
Who is Harold, which Red Spot, and what was The Dream about anyway? What if I instead told you that this movie featured the scarecrow, spiders, and the pale woman. Or even better, what if I showed you.
They had the challenge of turning gothic pencil artwork into believable characters in a live action world. We got our first look at many of these monsters in quick trailers during the Super Bowl. I said it was good advertising then (in this article, kinda fun to read about trailers for movies that have since happened) and I think more-so now. Show monster, jump scare, Guillermo del Toro. That’s what you need to know about this movie.
Bringing Stories to Life
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was directed by André Øvredal. He’s got a weird foreign monster movie called Troll Hunter, and a dark mystery/horror The Autopsy of Jane Doe on his IMDb that are okay for genre fans, but this is definitely his most marketable movie to date. In a weird trollhunting coincidence Dan & Kevin Hageman worked with Guillermo del Toro on the animated TrollHunters TV show that is a fun kids recommendation. And even though I mentioned the illustrator of the books first, the author Alvin Schwartz should get a mention too.
Bringing us to Guillermo del Toro. Possibly my favorite guy in the business today. Not that his movies are always my favorite, but I’m a huge fan of his director’s commentaries, interviews, and contributions to other things. Like when Bravo had their 100 Scariest Movie Moments. It was a typical “Top However-Many Show” concept that VH1 or ESPN will do where people in the industry, comedians, and writers will talk about why they love whatever thing they’re ranking. Del Toro’s comments were fantastic, he just knows his horror. No way around it. And whatever he touches always looks great. It’s what this book adaptation needed most, and it’s what he brought.
Scarier Pictures Than Stories
Unfortunately beyond the looks and the scares, the movie really slows down, right when it should be picking up. Many of the themes the movie told us to care about early on didn’t totally pay off later. The movie is set in ’68 with a backdrop of the Nixon election and Vietnam that never meant enough to the plot to warrant how much screen-time it got. Also the stories themselves were supposed to be based on things each kid was afraid of, but sometimes they would just say “I’m afraid of that” or “I’ve had a dream” by way of set up before forging ahead with the monsters. And the little ghost girl pulling the strings wanted to tell stories and have them be heard in a *very* The Ring kind of way but we never totally got why.
While the total package had some cohesive issues, the individual parts make it worth seeing. The scares are scary and the stories are story-y.
It’s a fun horror that delivered where it needed and made me want to head back into those books. Even just to look at the pictures.