Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has fun with its frights

Michael Garza and Zoe Margaret Colletti in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Nostalgia is the heartbeat of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. From the retro 1960s setting to the familiarity of the folklore, Scary Stories is soaked in memories, of childhoods spent reading under blankets with a flashlight in one hand and a collection of macabre tales in the other. Scary Stories gets a lot of mileage from that nostalgia, which elevates the film in its more entertaining moments but hurts it when it strays too far from fond memories.

Based on the eponymous book series by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories centers on life in a small Pennsylvania town right around Halloween circa1968. Friends Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and Chuck (Austin Zajur) meet Ramón (Michael Garza) on Halloween night as they evade the wraith of local sociopath Tommy (Austin Abrams). To complete their Halloween adventure, they go to the abandoned mansion of Sarah Bellows, the focus of an urban legend for her storytelling prowess and accusations of poisoning local children a generation prior. Stella leaves the mansion with Sarah’s book of scary stories, which soon start becoming all too real nightmares. Stella, her friends, and Chuck’s sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn) must figure out how they are becoming characters in Sarah’s book before they vanish from existence.

The Scary Stories book series is beloved by millennials, serving as an introduction to horror for many children. The series is an equally valuable resource for understanding how these stories came to be, with Schwartz outlining each story’s origins and how interpretations change across regions. But the stories themselves are hit or miss: For every terrorizing short like Harold and The Wendigo there is a silly interlude like The Viper or The Hearse Song. The film focuses on the more terrifying tales, driving home some of the fears inherent to the legends. Director André Øvredal does a splendid job of developing a chilling, eerie, and bizarre atmosphere for his retelling, ratcheting up the tension by disorienting the characters and the audience. One of the driving themes of the movie is the fatalism of life, how people react once they know their time is running out. Øvredal often frames his stories to match this feeling of doom, tightening the character’s environments until only the inevitable can occur.

And, honestly, the books are less memorable for the stories – Schwartz’s storytelling is more entertaining than discomfiting – than Stephen Gammell’s illustrations, which often made the stories seem far more terrifying than they were. Scary Stories uses his art as inspiration for its character design, and while the film doesn’t meet the level of fear conjured by Gammell’s work – his style is too simple and brutal to nail in film – it adds a bizarre feeling to the movie. There’s an appreciated contrast between the reality of the film and the surreal nature of the art, particularly with the characters in Harold and The Dream. They are in essence still fantasies pulled into reality, never quite fitting into their surroundings and thus standing out for their peculiarity.

Where things get a little troublesome and where the film’s overarching shortcomings shift into focus is the third act. Scary Stories has difficulty finding an appropriate ending to the supernatural frights, shifting instead to a generic pursuit with a lackluster resolution. The movie dedicates so much of its efforts to setting an eerie environment while emphasizing efficient storytelling that ending on an exposition-laden chase is tonally incorrect. The resolution to the ghost problem is similarly off, failing to find a balance between invoking terror and finding sympathy for the villain. Explaining why the ghost is angry is more interesting as a concept than the results shown in the movie, especially with an explanation as forced as rage. There’s also an unnecessarily epic ghost scream because the filmmakers thought it appropriate to have the ghost not go quietly into that good afterlife. The movie generally falls short when it strays too far away from the stories and into generic horror filmmaking, which hits the final act and spoils some of the good vibes.

Where the books and the movie align though is an emphasis on the enjoyment of being scared. Scary Stories in all its forms is accessible horror, a strange introduction into the world of fear and chills. Diehard horror film fans won’t get a ton of frights from this movie, but for less versed viewers this will jolt and disturb with great efficiency. The movie is fun, and there’s always room for one more bit of fun in horror.

  

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 111 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Atmosphere, Character Design, Folklore

What Fell Short: Third Act, Dialog, Character Motivation

What To Read/Watch As Well: The original book series, Trick ’r Treat, A Nightmare on Elm Street