“Sarah Bellows tell me a story.” These are the words that propel Alvin Schwartz’s infamously gruesome children’s story collection, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — now off of the page and onto the screen.
Set in 1968, Scary Stories opens on a small Pennsylvania town on Halloween night. As we pan over this quintessential rustbelt suburb, the archetypal horror flick song, Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” sets the tone. This cliché is the last bit of run-of-the-mill ‘70s-era horror we get, as director André Øvredal immediately plays with expectation in the face of classic films like Halloween and more contemporary horror works like Stranger Things.
Unlike the books, and to the film’s success, Scary Stories isn’t an anthology. Rather, the film follows three companions and their new friend as they explore the truth behind the town’s most infamous urban legend.
Childhood friends Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) begin the night with a plan to exact revenge on local bully Tommy (Austin Abrams). When their plan goes horribly wrong, they seek shelter in a stranger’s car at a drive-in theater. Sparks fly between the nomadic Ramón (Michael Garza) and Stella, who, eager to spend more time with the handsome newcomer, suggests a spooky Halloween trip to the local haunted house.
After a quick breaking-and-entering act, the four explore the massive Gothic mansion as Stella regales them with the legend of Sarah Bellows, a young woman who was rumored to have been locked away in the underbelly of the house where she told the local children stories through the walls.
But the big hook of Sarah’s story goes further: everyone who has heard one of her tales has died. When the tweens find Sarah Bellows’ underground chamber, aspiring horror writer Stella can’t resist stealing her book of stories away for some light, nighttime reading.
But each night, a new story begins writing itself, weaving a terrifying fate for anyone who has encountered the book.
“Harold,” “The Red Spot,” “The Dream” and several other of Schwartz’s iconic stories come to life onscreen; with king of horror Guillermo del Toro as the producing force behind this adaptation, they don’t disappoint.
Whether it’s the prospect of spiders bursting through a spot on your face, or quietly and slowly being cornered by a pale and grotesque figure, Øvredal leans into the source material.
Scary Stories is successful because it’s actually scary. Øvredal creates exceptional dread using dark, unflinching silence. Sure, this does mean that the jump scares abound — but that’s easily the most underrated tactic in today’s jaded notion of horror. It may not be the total gore fest or drug-induced hysteria that R-rated films give, but it does harken back to a more recent golden age of horror movies from the early aughts; all PG-13, but still unsettling enough to delight and unnerve viewers.
Schwartz’s book series is notorious for the ghastly and deeply disturbing illustrations artist Stephen Gammell created to accompany the stories. Gammell’s gaunt faces, though minimal, effectively used color and wispy, spindling lines that haunted readers for life.
From the grotesque scarecrow Harold to the shuffling and rasping corpse in search of her lost toe, Scary Stories features the same gruesome images that terrified and inspired young readers, but animated in a way that fulfills every child’s worst nightmare.
Though clunky and simplistic at times, the script itself imposes a wonderful juxtaposition between the scary moments of an urban legend come to life and the events that unfold during the peak of political unrest surrounding Richard Nixon’s impending presidential stint and the Vietnam War.
Del Toro and his fellow screenwriters, brothers Kevin and Dan Hageman, make this subplot more subtle than overt, and though it may seem as if they don’t intersect, the two plots meet at the film’s climax in a subtle yet powerful way. Using human lives to shield unpleasant truths orchestrated by pride and greed is a big message to send to tweens, but del Toro is (correctly) confident that they can handle it.
Scary Stories treats its young audience like adults. With genuinely suspenseful and emotional moments (I may or may not have cried at least once) and a complex background plot about Vietnam, mental health, white supremacy and racism, and political unrest, Scary Stories does more than scare its audience; it imparts the importance of telling stories, particularly if that story is about an unpleasant truth. As one of the characters reveals: “Stories heal. Stories hurt. If we repeat them enough, they become true.”
(In theaters) (PG-13) Grade: A-
This article appears in Aug 7-14, 2019.
