Too much story and not enough scares
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 15 Cert, 107 min
Dir André Øvredal Starring Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Austin Zajur, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris, Gil Bellows
Plucked from a series of short stories by the American writer Alvin Schwartz, which were first published under that title in 1981, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a pick ‘n’ mix of nightmarish tales.
Though intended for children, supposedly aged eight to 12, they became rather notorious because of the illustrations by Stephen Gammell – legitimately skin-crawling, wispy drawings with a ghoulish suggestiveness and sick grandeur. A red spot, on the face of a girl named Ruth, explodes open into a black, spider-infested crater, for instance.
The prim Victorian-gothic horrors of Edward Gorey had nothing on these. Come a new 2011 edition, parental complaints had reached such a peak that the books were reillustrated blandly by someone else.
Guillermo del Toro has been inspired – as much by Gammell’s creepy artwork, by the looks of things, as Schwartz’s text – to produce and co-write this adaptation, which strings together a few of the most infamous yarns with a linking story about suburban teens exploring a local legend. The idea isn’t far off George A Romero’s fantastic Creepshow (1982), or one of the Amicus-produced
anthology horrors from the Seventies. In fact, if the film had fully embraced its episodic quality, it might have paid off in exactly that way.
Norwegian director André Øvedal (Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) certainly has form with the uncanny, and del Toro’s has a knack for showcasing effects coups that are hard to imagine in the pre-cgi age: a ghoul reassembling itself from tumbled body parts, say, or a scarecrow with no midriff coming to life. The set pieces score nicely, at least when they’re paying attention: an undeniably gross tale called The Big Toe, involving a polluted stew that suddenly materialises in someone’s fridge, is awkward and implausibly handled.
The promising Zoe Colletti (as a budding genre writer), strikes up an appealing puppy-love rapport with Ramón (Michael Garza), a dreamy draft-dodger passing through town.
But the thrown-together finale in a haunted mansion is a bit of a mess, feebly cross-cutting between this pair. It’s left to the design team, once again, to come to the rescue, laying on spectral flourishes in the cobwebby dungeon where an old-fashioned family once locked up their hapless daughter.
Most effective of all the visitations – and the one lifted reverentially from one of Gammell’s weirdest drawings – is a pale-faced lady, shuffling along like one of the bloated demons from Hellraiser, who lurks in the corridors of an old lunatic asylum and pops up everywhere you turn.
Chillingly achieved without CGI, she’ll be the dominant talking point for the older-teen demographic here – except for extreme arachnophobes or those terrified of a boil breaking out. Scary Stories hits with the scares as much as it misses with the storytelling, levelling out to a glass half full.