Described as a gateway horror film for the young adult audience by its Oscar winning producer Guillermo del Toro, Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark is a fun, at times incredibly intense horror film. Director André Øvredal and a game group of young actors do their best to bring the terrifying children’s books to life in this film, and mostly succeed.
Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Augie (Gabriel Rush), and Chuck (Austin Zajur) are best friends and plan to live Halloween to the fullest by trick or treating and throwing bags of poop at school bullies. They even make a new friend Ramon (Michael Garza) while hiding out in his car from the bullies. Deciding that the night isn’t complete, they break into the Bellows House and find a book from Sarah Bellows, a lonely girl who was kept locked in a basement, who used to tell scary stories to children. Deciding to read from the book, they unleash a terror on the town and must dig deep within themselves to defeat the evil.
Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark is a fun movie, but though the movie pushes against its rating admirably, it cannot break free of its intentions to appeal to a younger demo. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is one of the loudest horror movies you’re sure to see, really trying to amp up the jump scares. This approach often left me feeling as if someone kept pressing the button on a blow horn, rather than making me leap out of my chair. I’m sure many people will find these moments scary, but they really distracted, and undercut, the moments of increasing dread and peril Andre was going for.
The script is probably the weakest link of this film, just for the sheer amount of things its trying to juggle. The central mystery about Sarah is compelling, but the way the film solves it is so juvenile that Sarah should probably haunt the screenwriters into telling her story better. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark seems to operate under the notion that it has to get to the ending as quickly as possible, using the Game of Thrones method coined by the Storm of Spoilers folks “Efficiency is coming.” There certainly was some more room to have the kids do more detective work and really bring the town’s tough history to the carpet, more understanding of exactly what kind of town it was (outside of it being filled with mostly racist white people), or any kind of real reaction from the adults and other kids about the fact that three children went missing in a short span of time. There’s the spectre of Nixon’s presidency that hangs over the movie via clips and posters, and the Night of the Living Dead references are not lost on us, but there’s not much there there in terms of the plot.
While the script might have called the actors to do some foolish stuff, they knocked it out of the park convincingly. Zoe Margaret Colletti and Austin Zajur, who reminds me so much of a young Dylan O’Brien, led the pack with their excellent work. It’s too bad the movie couldn’t also rise to their level.