Scary Stories in a Mundane Movie

If you open up Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark to just about any page, you’ll be confronted with a surreal and haunting illustration from Stephen Gammell, arguably too unnerving for the books’ target audience of children. These sketches more than the stories themselves (often already repurposed from folklore and urban legends), with their colourless depth, stylized shadows, vividly perverted features, and crude textures implying a deranged originator really have a way of sticking in the recesses of ones’ mind waiting to surface all of a sudden in some nightmare. I would venture to guess that such eldritch horror imagery is what captivated Guillermo del Toro, always a fan of the macabre.

The resulting movie of this fascination, also called Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, on which del Toro has a producing and story credit and is directed by André Øvredal, certainly acquiesces to the frightfulness of the books’ monster designs. Though never as effective in physical form as they are in the abstract, the mostly practical creature effects are immaculately creepy and unnerving. With the exception of one CGI corpse that bears an unfortunate resemblance to a 2000s video game creation, each of the horrors is tangibly adapted and strikingly scary. They’re a large part of what makes the horror sequences work, with the other key being rooted in the simple terror of these self-contained stories themselves. There’s a reason urban legends and seminal campfire stories like The Killer in the Back-Seat, the Licked Hand, The Babysitter, and (probably the most clichéd) The Hook, are, depending on the skill of the storyteller, still somewhat chilling. They have an inherently suspenseful structure, an identifiable context (for middle-class white people), and harrowing twists designed to play off your imagination. While that last aspect of their appeal can’t ever be adapted sufficiently to film, the monsters and scenarios can never be as scary as your personal fears can make them, that ominous suspense and relatability is conveyed fairly well by this movies’ direction, cinematography, editing, lighting and sound choices, and refreshing hesitance to depict any typical gore .

In between the horror sequences though, there’s very little the film has to offer to hold your investment until the next one. It boldly expects audiences to care about its teenage cast of walking stock characters led by the goth storyteller (Zoe Margaret Colleti) of a thousand mediocre Halloween specials (the first act is set at Halloween where it’s laughably apparent these trick-or-treaters are at least five years too old). The attempts to give a couple of them sad, motivational backstories that are inescapably lazy, if anything makes them less compelling and more transparently constructs. The same applies to the general plotting, which itself relies on expository dregs and tiresome conventions. Occasionally the film teases a meaningful consideration of something like grief or racism: the co-lead played by Michael Garza is a Latino boy avoiding the police. But then the movie would swiftly avoid delving into such topics and even throw in a magical black woman for good measure. Nothing in the relevant local history about Sarah Bellows, a woman who allegedly murdered children in a pedestrian haunted house, and her book of stories that write themselves holds any value apart from those very facts. Any notes of sympathy and psychological horror the movie wants to inspire in this focus on her life and death is misguided -the writing is simply not equipped to be A Haunting of Hill House style case study. The writing is not even equipped to give most characters decent dialogue.

It’s difficult not to prefer the idea of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as an anthology film. This does seem to be the most obvious form of presentation given the source material, and the filmmakers knew it. Ultimately del Toro’s reasons for not going that route were in his words, “anthology films are always as bad as the worst story in them, they’re never as good as the best story.” I don’t necessarily agree (Paris, je t’aime, The Animatrix, and Kurosawa’s Dreams are just a few examples to refute that point), but at the same time I understand the apprehension -there have been dozens of horror anthologies and how many are actually memorable? And so the movie devised a smart way around this, a means of translating the stories in a straightforward narrative. But the result in having the book manifest horrors inspired by the personal fears of the individuals it’s targeting makes the movie feel very derivative of It -something the presence of a young cast and few on-screen adult figures (Dean Norris, Gil Bellows) doesn’t help sway. Often you’re reminded of better horror movies this one’s borrowing its tropes from. Though the climax is well-paced and frighteningly claustrophobic, suggesting a darker and better ending than the one it delivers on, its resolution is bitterly banal, outdone by of all films, ParaNorman.

And yet Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark leaves off on a firm “to be continued…”, an audaciousness it doesn’t come close to earning, being neither strong nor singular enough. This is the kind of movie that is set in 1968 ostensibly just to avoid modern conveniences for its protagonists and to evoke a half-hearted sense of nostalgia (why boomer nostalgia, I don’t know) –there’s no narrative or aesthetic purpose for it. But the film is desperately chasing the success of It and Stranger Things without putting in the required effort where it’s most needed. The scary parts are suitably scary, and with everything else rather lacklustre, a version of this movie solely comprised of such scary parts sounds much more appealing.

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