Review: Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

If the recent season of "Stranger Things" and the upcoming second half of "It" aren't enough of a fix for those seeking stories about ragtag groups of kids coming up against sinister, supernatural forces in small town America, and complete with period nostalgia, then "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" will be something to seek out.

However, while the prospect of the creepy stories and even more horrifying illustrations that accompanied Alvin Schwartz's iconic 1980s series of books coming to life on the screen sounds delicious, the film takes a very R-rated concept and stuffs it somewhat unconvincingly into a PG-13 movie.

While the books caused trauma for generations of children, the film just isn't that frightening. It has a few jump scare moments and some creepy imagery, but it gets nowhere near being as unsettling as the original books or their illustrations.

The picture is set in 1968, and we're reminded of such by constant clips of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's presidential campaign flashing by on televisions, while Donovan sings "Season of the Witch" and the film's protagonists flee from some bullies into a drive-in theater, which is screening "Night of the Living Dead," all the more appropriate considering the film is set in a small Pennsylvania town.

Stella (Zoe Colletti), a fan of horror comics and movies, discovers a book of short, scary stories by a woman named Sarah Bellows, the black sheep of a rich local family from a century before, when she and her pals Chuck (Austin Zajur), Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Ramon (Michael Garza), a Latino youth passing through town who joins the group after saving them from the bullies at the drive-in, break into the Bellows' deserted home.

The group - which also includes Chuck's sister, Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn) and lead bully Tommy (Austin Abrams) - accidentally awakens Sarah Bellows's anger, and she responds by placing each of them at the center of a scary story in which they are terrorized by a specific fear.

At this point, several of the scary stories from Schwartz's book come to life - "The Big Toe," "Harold," "The Red Spot," "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker" and "The Dream," which is the best of the bunch. Surprisingly missing is the creepy "High Beams" and "Don't Turn on the Light."

One of the biggest issues with the film is that the individual stories work pretty well on their own - well, maybe not "Dough-ty Walker" - but they are at the service of a tired plot about a spirit seeking vengeance and tracking down one individual at a time, a horror trope that has been beyond exhausted. Also, as I'd mentioned, the movie just isn't that scary, and the dialogue is occasionally wooden and solely for the purpose of exposition.

For a mainstream horror movie, "Scary Stories" isn't bad - it's just overly familiar, something of which Schwartz's book could possibly have been accused if it weren't for the terrifying illustrations by Stephen Gammell. The film sets us up for a sequel - and should it come to that, I hope the filmmakers up the ante on the frights. As it stands, the picture is just another in a long recent line of movies about kids battling the supernatural in bygone eras, but with little to distinguish it from other entries to that sub-genre.