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SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK
Director: André Øvredal Cast: Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Austin Zajur, Gabriel Rush, Natalie Ganzhorn, Dean Norris, Austin Abrams, Gil Bellows, Lorraine Toussaint MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:51 Release Date: 8/9/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2019 Adapting Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, a trio of collections of short horror stories for the most daring of kids, into a feature-length movie would seem like a fairly simple task, albeit not a particularly great idea. The problem with a straightforward adaptation, of course, is that the stories are short—and very, very short at that. An anthology movie would be an assault of segments running a few minutes apiece, almost always ending with some horrific sight and a jump-scare to go along with each one. Fraternal screenwriters Dan and Kevin Hageman avoid the simplest, most obvious, and likely most unfulfilling approach to adapting Schwartz's books. Their version of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark begins with a sense of nostalgia for the days when frightening tales were things you heard from a friend, who heard it from some other friend, who guaranteed that the story had to be true, because it really happened to someone a distant relative knew. In reality, the kid probably got it from one of Schwartz's books. The major scary legend here is that of a haunted house in a quiet, anonymously American town, where a young girl was kept hidden away from the world before growing up to meet some cruel fate. This character, herself the subject of a local horror tale, is the teller of stories during her life, when kids would knock on the walls of the not-yet haunted house to hear something spooky, and after her death, when a story from her would be last thing a kid would ever hear. She kept a book of those stories during her life in the mid-19th century, and a group of kids finds the tome, with plenty of pages for new tales to be written by a ghastly hand, on Halloween night of 1968, as the war in Vietnam rages on and Richard Nixon is about to be elected President. It's a scary enough time, and beyond the obvious call to nostalgia for an era when macabre tales were matters of face-to-face storytelling, maybe that's why the Hagemans selected this specific span of a week. After all, we don't just tell scary stories for the rush of fear. We also tell them as a reminder that, while things are bad, they could always be worse. The movie's version of 1968 is a place where real-world violence is always on the TV, where a detestable liar is about to hold the highest office of power in the world, and where prejudice against anyone who looks different from the inhabitants of this small town isn't hidden. Things are always bad, so here's a bunch of frightening stories to remind us that matters could always be worse. The setup here is full of promise of fears real and imagined. Once the gears of an actual plot are set in motion, though, the Hagemans and director André Øvredal simply go through the motions, giving us one creepy setpiece after another, while the characters and the story are put on the backburners. The kids who explore the haunted house and find that cursed book are aspiring horror writer Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), her two friends Chuck (Austin Zajur) and Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and Ramón (Michael Garza), an out-of-towner just passing through while getting sideways glances and more obvious abuse from the locals. The central gimmick is that the book, which Stella brings home with her, is still being written by an invisible hand, belonging to the specter of Sarah Bellows, the girl who grew up in forced isolation and eventually committed suicide. Worse than that, as the ghost writes the stories, they become reality. The tales, of course, come from Schwartz's books, and the ones incorporated into the narrative here usually feature some grotesque monster—a living scarecrow with an absent midsection, a corpse looking for its big toe, an otherworldly woman with a thinly long smile and arms open for a deadly embrace, a dismembered creature that reassembles itself and chants a nonsense phrase—stalking the characters. A routine is quickly established, as a character runs away from the lumbering monster, before losing the chase. One sequence, involving Chuck's older sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn) and what appears to be a pretty nasty pimple, breaks that pattern for the icky payoff of what's actually inside the growing lump on the girl's cheek. Otherwise, we get the same basic sequence, with only changes to the location and the monster doing the stalking, in between periods of the characters repeating the central gimmick of the plot. Øvredal does what he can with this basic procedure, using silence quite effectively for longer stretches than we might anticipate. One moment and one sequence do stand out from the rest: The moment involves a reversal of looking for something hiding under the bed, and the sequence is set in an abandoned hospital wing, where the gruesome creature appears down whichever hallway the eventual victim finds. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark possesses some eerie atmosphere, a couple of creepy moments, and a real-world backdrop that both embraces and shatters the nostalgic ideal. It's also, mostly, a pedestrian horror story that never lives up to its potential. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
terror/violence, disturbing images, thematic elements, language
including racial epithets, and brief sexual references)
