You call this scary?
Adaptation of children’s horror series is undeveloped and ultimately fizzles
Stories make us who we are, we learn in the ponderous voiceover that kicks off André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, produced by Guillermo del Toro. So goes the thesis for this tribute to the series of the same name by Alvin Schwartz, whose tersely written flash fiction about eerie things creeping into everyday life has introduced children to urban legends since 1981, thanks in no small part to the evocative charcoal and ink illustrations by Stephen Gammell.
A horror movie for young adults that doubles as an essay on horror as a coping method for the downtrodden, the film feels like a workshop for del Toro’s style. That’s in spite of the fact that as a horror movie in its own right it’s largely a wash — an inert visual podcast that’s sweeter than it is scary.
Riding in on the same wave of nostalgia for the vintage and the analog as Stranger Things, the opening montage introduces us to a group of ephemera-loving teenagers in 1968. It’s a time our wallflower and secret horror freak narrator Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) calls the waning days of their childhood in a sleepy U.S. town.
With Richard Nixon’s election on the horizon and the war in Vietnam well underway, Stella and her friends, including dreamy and mysterious new arrival Ramón (Michael Garza),
find themselves celebrating one last Halloween before they have to put away childish things for good. Locked in a haunted mansion by local bully Tommy (Austin Abrams), the gothic Breakfast Club doppelgängers stumble across a book belonging to infamous local dead girl Sarah Bellows (Kathleen Pollard). Before long, it starts dictating creepy and violent stories about them in blood, which come to life as quickly as the words are inked on the page.
Having Schwarz’s stories come to life onscreen via a Victorian ghost’s diary is a relatively novel idea for an adaptation, although it’s tough to square the author’s hard-boiled and impish voice in the stories with that of a surly teenage girl exacting her vengeance. Øvredal is a bit more successful in incorporating Gammell’s uncanny images into the film’s period setting, transplanting a number of the stories’ more memorable ghouls — a shambling creature whose limbs are all akimbo; a smirking scarecrow who never seems to stay in one place — more or less intact.
Despite these moments, the project feels stalled at the pitch stage, as though del Toro and the other four credited screenwriters spent so much of their time justifying the structure and historical context that they didn’t bother to flesh the film out with recognizable people or, ironically, stories worth getting scared by. Though the film finds some nice shading in Ramón’s uneasy relationship to his country as a racialized young man of draft age amid a war that would do more damage to his body than any monster could, for the most part, the 1968-era trivia feels like a shortcut to depth rather than the real thing.
There’s a bit more meat to Stella’s metaphysical link to Sarah as a fellow suffering young woman with a family secret, as well as a fellow horror writer. Even when his films are at their most prosaic and overstuffed, as in the gothic melodrama of Crimson Peak, there’s something touching about del Toro’s desire to treat horror stories as teachable moments. He treats them as opportunities, better than any school lesson and cheaper than any therapy session, for learning how to befriend people who scare us.
The trouble is that this sympathy and even love for monsters feels out of place and unconvincing in a film whose only genuinely creepy moments depend on the shock value of strange bodies suddenly appearing or inexorably marching toward our blandly good-looking heroes. Del Toro and Øvredal seem to want Sarah and company to be both pitiable and frightening. But in the end they’re neither, owing as much to the film’s penchant for lazy jump scares as its weak efforts to psychologize its characters. They’re ultimately all stereotypes: the jock, the nerd, the rebel, the sad little rich girl and the wizened young writer, tested and made stronger by her trauma.
Whatever credit the film might earn for ending on a grown-up note is minuscule in the face of its overwhelming problem. If these scrawny stories really do make us who we are, then who we are is about as substantial as the straw in a haunted scarecrow.