Introducing young audiences to the horror genre
It wasn’t too long ago, a little less than a year in fact, that the Frightening Ass Film Fest hosted a documentary on the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” book series. It was right around the time the president scheduled his visit to Chattanooga, and to me, there was simply nothing scarier than that.
Of course, the insanity has ramped up considerably since then, with the release of the seemingly ineffective Mueller Report, chants of “send her back” aimed at congresswomen of color who are American citizens, two mass shootings, one of which was explicitly influenced by the xenophobic rhetoric of the man holding the highest political office in the country.
Then, just this weekend, we saw the suicide of a rich white pedophile in prison, which caused the Commander in Chief to tweet out a conspiracy theory accusing the Clintons of staging a murder. At this juncture, a murderous scarecrow or a decapitated head falling out of a chimney is positively quaint.
We need scary stories. We need to tell them in the dark. What’s happening in the light right now is beyond understanding.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark the film has been in the works since 2013. Directed by André Øvredal and based on a screen story by Guillermo del Toro, Scary Stories does a decent job of adapting what was essentially a collection of folk tales.
It creates a new narrative, using the stories as influences and illustrations as guides, to offer younger audiences a nice, introductory horror film that’s nowhere near as terrifying as watching the news.
The story is set in 1968, which is a great change of pace from the current crop of films chock-full of eighties nostalgia. Our protagonists are Stella, Auggie, and Chuck, a group of outsiders who have a beef with local bully Tommy.
They play a prank on Tommy on Halloween, which causes him to wreck his car. The group seeks refuge in a nearby drive-in and pile into the car of Ramon, a young drifter trying to remain unnoticed.
After Tommy has been effectively dispatched, they all decide to visit a house that’s said to be haunted. The house belonged to the Bellows family, who settled there and opened a successful paper mill.
It’s said the youngest daughter Sarah was crazy and locked away from the outside world, but she would whisper scary stories to children of the town from inside the walls, and those children would go on to die.
Stella discovers a book in a hidden room, written in red ink, and surmises that it must have belonged to the witch in the walls. She takes to book with her when they leave, only to learn that the stories are still being written and the characters include her and her friends.
The film has a decent premise overall. The screenplay has to include many of the most recognizable stories from the book series and, in general, it weaves them together in a comprehensible fashion.
Still, Scary Stories leans fairly heavily on jump scares and loud noises to get the point across. In a lot of movies, this might seem cheap and easy. It feels that way here, too, but if you are familiar with the books, you know that many of them end with a jump scare (assuming the stories are being read aloud—“The Big Toe” ends by the reader shouting “You’ve Got It!”).
It’s important to remember that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a collection for children, a stepping stone to darker, more gruesome things. The film plays well to that audience.
Still, those of use familiar with the books know that the stories weren’t the scary part. It was the illustrations by Stephen Gammell. His creations are on display in the film through monsters created by the book, but I feel like the production design might have leaned more heavily on the atmosphere Gammell created in the books.
Other than the monsters, everything in the film seems pretty boilerplate. I would have enjoyed seeing more of Gammell’s ink dripping through the frames of the film. As it is, though, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is entertaining enough, particularly for its audience.