Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Review

By: Nik S

If you were born sometime between the 1980s and the 1990s then you have certainly seen this book series at the Scholastic book fairs. That haunting image of a giant skull dressed as a clown has been seared into the memories of so many people. The books themselves contained, well, scary stories to tell in the dark (hence the title). They were ghost stories to tell your friends around a campfire or during a sleepover. Each story didn't take long and was at max five or six pages long, but some of those stories stuck with the readers. So it was a huge surprise when Guillermo del Toro announced that he would be producing a movie of the same name. Many Millenials and Gen Xers alike were ecstatic for this release, because who knows which ghosts and creatures we'd see on the big screen. With Stephen Gammel's original artwork, the designs would be pretty easy for the movie to use.

Six of the over 80 stories were put into the main story of the movie (with a few others mentioned), which some were used effectively while others were majorly retooled to fit the story. While many assumed this movie was going to be an anthology, it is actually a linear story that follows a young girl and her small group of friends from Halloween night to election day. The main story takes place in a town called Mill Valley in the fall of 1968. Our main character, Stella (Zoe Coletti), is a horror fanatic and an aspiring writer joins her two friends Chuck (Austin Zajur) and Auggie (Gabriel Rush) to prank a town bully. After the prank takes a turn for the worse, they hide in a stranger's car where Stella immediately becomes friends with the owner Ramón (Michael Garza). The group, after staring down the town bully Thomas again, decide to check out a house of the town's first family that is alleged to be haunted. 

The local legend is that the daughter of the home's owners, Sarah, had been kept locked away by her family. She would tell scary stories to children through her wall to anyone willing to listen. Anyone who listened to any of her tales swiftly died a mysterious death, so the townspeople demanded her death which led to her suicide of hanging herself with her own hair. The legend is that Sarah can still tell you a scary story if you ask her to, but the price would be death. While searching the house, our main cast finds her hidden room and a shelf full of old books. Stella, not letting a spooky opportunity like this pass her up, snags one of the books and asks Sarah to tell her a story.

The cast fills in the stereotypical horror cast archetypes, which doesn't hinder the flow of the movie at all. In fact, most of the major characters play their parts well and even got a few chuckles out of me from their great line delivery. Even though these types of characters have been played to death, after a while you start to enjoy these particular characters.

While the cast may be a major plus for the movie, its downfall is the incorporation of the original stories and a slight political message. Since the film takes place in 1968 it uses the Nixon election and the Vietnam war as one of its background story elements. While that's more of subtlety for the adults to pick up on, it thankfully doesn't hinder the plot much. The classic stories we grew up to love, however, do not get the love and attention they so deserved. They seem to only last for a very short time--grant it, they weren't long stories to begin with but they could have been fleshed out with the right pacing--and feel like they're only thrown in so they could use the book's name for the title. While about three or four of the six stories chosen for the movie feel like they had the overall feeling of their stories shown, the rest are so majorly changed that the only thing in common with their original is just their title. 

While there are good acting and some interesting cinematography, there is a lot flawed with the handling of the classic stories that it almost hurts much of the pacing. If you're an adult looking for a horror movie, this isn't really meant for you despite the nostalgia behind it. The target audience is definitely middle schoolers. It seemed like the writers were inspired by the Goosebumps movie, Stranger Things, and It that they wanted to make their own version of that. If you want to introduce your child to horror but don't think they're ready for the classics like Freddy and Jason, then this is a decent stepping stone.