SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK: Detailed, Disgusting & Dim

There’s certainly a mishmash nature to how Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark mushes together its story, monsters, and allegory. The messy assembly gives off the sensation of a fever dream where the simplicity of Are You Afraid of the Dark and the grossness of Tales From the Crypt fused together. Like any fever dream, I was more astounded by the very construction of its weirdness than its desires to scare past the typical tropes of haunted houses and jump scares.

A Book of Blood

The 1968 setting finds a group of American teenagers trying to find something to do on Halloween in their sleepy town of Mill Valley. For horror-loving Stella (Zoe Colletti), she knows just what to do on such a night; break into a haunted house. Since there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot happening in their town, it’s natural that her teenage friends would be drawn into getting a load of the creepy old manor where the ghost of the suicidal girl, Sarah Bellows, haunts the old walls.

Stumbling around, Stella and her friends find Sarah’s spooky book written in the blood of children. The stories inside end up coming to life and literally write themselves. Oh, and it’s apparently indestructible and cannot be burned or ripped apart. That feature comes standard with all cursed books.

Stella is an interesting character, but we don’t get a whole lot out of her as an aspiring horror writer. We get brief glimpses of her bedroom, plastered with horror movie posters and hear all about how she’s read a slew of horror comic books from cover to cover. But we don’t have time for her to resonate with that horror geek mindset, reducing her appeal to being able to quote Night of the Living Dead so effortlessly.

Compounding how little time she has to develop are her deeply rooted fears of a tragic past that have left her father (Dean Norris) emotionally unsure of how to raise his kid. It’s a little troubling considering that Zoe Colletti works exceptionally well in her roles, always carrying a genuine sense of curiosity and fear throughout.

The film undoubtedly has a routine that rarely shakes free of the old path. We get to know more of the teens as a likable group, including the quiet outsider Ramón (Michael Garza), the nerdy Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and the curly-haired and pensive Tommy (Austin Abrams). But we only get to know them briefly before they’re dashing away from bullies or desperately trying to solve the curse of Sarah Bellows.

There are very few times when they’re just hanging out, favoring more scenes of them sorting through old files for the truth and racing towards the next person the book has targeted. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of racing towards the scares is that a handful of them come off with typical construction; the music drops, the sound effects get louder, and characters carefully peak their heads around corners to eventually see the monster that will kill them.

More About Monsters

André Øvredal’s directing has such a brisk shirking of character for the frights and part of me understands why. The monsters they encounter in paranormal nightmare visions are superbly assembled and brilliantly presented. The Pale Lady looks like a terrifying marshmallow monster straight out of a surreal Japanese horror with a beautifully bizarre method of killing her victims, wrapped in the glow of flickering red lights. Harold the scarecrow has such a great presence that is perfectly preserved within the darkness of a cornfield.

There are even some body-horror frights involving a gross pimple that I honestly didn’t expect to get out of a PG-13 horror. These are sights worthy of Guillermo del Toro’s branding where the usual monster effects are anything but dull. I could easily see one of these many creatures ambling about in the background of Hellboy II. And though the film does carry with it a handful of jump-scare moments, they are at least technically well designed, backed up by a perfectly eerie score by Marco Beltrami and Anna Drubich.

So much seems to be going on with the superbly staged terrors that the allegory of the era has to be pounded into the picture bluntly. The film constantly brings up the draft for the Vietnam war and the reelection of Richard Nixon as president, to the point where a character will casually stroll into a room, turn off a TV set with Nixon, and casually mention Tricky Dicky is not a good name.

Even the relation of the importance of stories and how they shape our worldview is stressed from the very first scene and bookends the picture to make its intentions crystal clear. The very climax of the film gets a bit wordy as well, where saying less would’ve said a whole lot more as the film holds our hand right up to the final scene, even blatantly telling us of the potential of a sequel.

Conclusion: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

There’s more frill than frights but just enough style and empathy to be admirable if not scary. I appreciated the film more on a surface level where it delivered in its ambitious sequences more than its bolder take on a tale of truth and the power writing. At least the message is a positive enough one about learning from the past, which will hopefully resonate loud enough to not be overlooked by the more enjoyable thrills of killer scarecrows and contorting zombies.

Was the story scary enough for you? Let us know in the comments below.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark opens August 9th in the US. Click here for all release dates.