Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

Review

108min

Genre:       Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Director:    André Øvredal

Cast:         Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Austin Zajur…and more

Writers:     Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, Guillermo del Toro…more

-Synopsis-

When a group of teenagers discover a manifesting book of scary stories in a creepy abandoned mansion in late 1960s USA, they unleash a dark fate upon their small town, as they uncover the morbid story behind the foreboding volume and its writer, and are forced to face their fears to survive.

No stranger to cinematic witchcraft and the supernatural having made his name in indie horror with films like ‘Trollhunter’ and ‘The Autopsy of Jane Doe’, Norwegian director André Øvredal teams up with visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, on writing and producing duty here, to adapt Alvin Schwartz’s short story series and bring us a spooky tale of spooky tales—giving us a classic American horror of haunted houses, myths and legends come to life but with modern dynamism, and a dark ode to storytelling . . . and those who tell them.

Zoe Margaret Colletti stars as 1968 small town high school outsider and aspiring writer ‘Stella’, on a final Halloween night out with her friends and fellow outcasts ‘Chuck’ (Austin Zajur) and ‘Auggie’ (Gabriel Rush) when they meet mysterious drifter ‘Ramón’ (Michael Garza), venturing together to the creepy local abandoned Bellows mansion where they uncover a book of scary stories. But their nighttime frolics soon become an inescapable nightmare when the town’s legends come to life, as the book starts to write its own horrific stories, with them as the victims—forcing the youngsters to uncover the dark buried secrets of their town and the story behind the terrifying tome they’ve unleashed . . . and its mysterious author.

If the film feels slightly familiar and perhaps a tad derivative, sharing much with Stephen King’s ‘IT’ and the ‘Goosebumps’ series of books and films, it’s no doubt not only because Øvredal, del Toro et al were inspired by plenty of horror lore, but because the movie is based on the influential and folklore-heavy collection of short stories by Alvin Schwartz— a controversial series aimed at young readers but featuring violent and horrific content . . . which sounds just up del Toro’s alley to us.

Indeed the director and the many producers and writers take several of Schwartz’s stories and weave them into a larger narrative with a core of characters in which they hope you’ll be invested by the end—of course leaving plenty of space for the possibility of sequels and a series—while constructing a tale of abandonment and abuse, rage and revenge, with a message. It also adds a social political angle as something of an afterthought, by setting the story against the backdrop of the escalating Vietnam war and the unpopular military draft that went with it, as well as the human consequences for those caught up in it all.

Apart from some dynamically modern scares—which do feature some slightly subpar CGI it must be said—‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ is a rather classic horror flick, with the spooky stories, nail-biting tension and relentless forces that come with it, not to mention strategically placed jumpscares. But that tension is rather inconsistent and never truly nerve-shredding, and the genuine frights are scattered and infrequent, albeit solid when they do hit.

A reasonable chunk of the appeal of the film revolves around the cinematic craftsmanship involved, which like all Guillermo del Toro projects features a certain aesthetic quality and visual standard we’ve come to expect, in this case featuring suitably subdued cinematography from Roman Osin and high quality production designs to re-create late 60s suburban USA, and a wonderful creepy abandoned mansion—although none of the visuals here approach the level of the Mexican auteur’s own directorial work, understandably so.

Ultimately like any other horror film’s success, everything hinges on how scary you find it, how creepy it is or how unsettled it makes you feel, and for our money ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ is passable without excelling at either. Apart from one excruciating bedroom scene, it’s just not consistently tense enough, despite some strategic and effective jumpscares, and it proves neither particularly horrifying nor creepy, while being frontloaded with its most iconic and unsettling creature, and leaving much to be desired for the rest of the film. In the end the writers and producers just couldn’t nail the narrative and character fabric needed to thread a series of promising standalone stories together, serving up characters which lack the sufficient audience investment with which to carry us into a likely sequel, if not a series.

What we’re left with is a reasonably inventive, moderately scary collection of horror premises inflicted upon characters we don’t really care about, woven together with a mystery which isn’t particularly intricate, and a human drama which is hardly compelling. The end result—a good looking, well-crafted but flat and unmemorable horror flick which fails to rise above the better horror options released this week . . . let alone the rest of another resurgent year for the genre in mainstream cinema.

The Bottom Line…

A spooky tale of tales which neither truly terrifies nor delights, ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ may be well crafted and largely look the part, but features neither enough consistent frights nor compelling characters or an enthralling enough overall story to lift it above the increasingly congested horror movie crowd, making this a promising period also-ran but one which fails to linger in the memory.

Similar films you may like (Home Video)

IT (2017)

When the children of Derry Maine start to mysteriously disappear, a group of 80s teenage outcasts are terrorised and hunted by a supernatural sinister being who takes the form of a clown and dwells in the sewers of their small town—forcing them to face their own deepest darkest fears in another adaptation of Stephen King’s classic horror novel.

Directed by Andy Muschietti and starring Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher and Finn Wolfhard among others.

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