Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes
Director: André Øvredal
Quick Impressions:
Our older kids absolutely love Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. We used to read them together when they were little. Well, I mean, beginning when our sixteen-year-old was more like eight, and our ten-year-old was closer to four. That’s little, right?
Our older kids absolutely love Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. We used to read them together when they were little. Well, I mean, beginning when our sixteen-year-old was more like eight, and our ten-year-old was closer to four. That’s little, right?
As it happens, actually telling scary stories in the dark is to this day one of our favorite family activities. We literally turn off all the lights (preferably on a stormy night) and try to thrill each other by making up scary stories. This usually drags on until somebody gets a) terrified by a reflection in the window or b) hungry. (Nothing makes our kids crave Cheez-Its like turning off all the lights.)
The great part about the beloved Alvin Schwartz series is that he didn’t make up the stories. When the Scary Stories books were wildly popular during my own childhood in the 80s and 90s, I never owned or read them (though I occasionally flipped through friends’ copies and admired the illustrations), so I didn’t realize that Schwartz was a dedicated folklorist who lovingly researched and collected all of these tales (some really old, handed down orally, others newer urban legends). His notes are in the back. I mean, they’re very abbreviated notes, but they do give you an idea of where to start a search if you want to find out more about a particular tale. This is a fascinating aspect of the series that I only discovered as an adult when seeking material appropriate for a young child who loved scary stories. Had I known that Schwartz was a dedicated folklorist and not simply a guy with a warped imagination, I probably would have read the series much sooner. (Nothing against guys with warped imaginations. It’s just that the research element highly appeals to me.)
Anyway, my son started his junior year last Wednesday, and my daughter started fifth grade today. So over the weekend we thought, what better last hurrah of summer than to watch a movie that appealed to us because of our fondness for the source material? (Plus we’re casual fans of Guillermo del Toro, who produced the film, and some of the movie’s writers also worked on his Netflix Trollhunters series, which we like.)
We left our four-year-old home with Grandma and Grandpa since promotional material for the movie made it look skin-crawlingly horrifying. (I wasn’t even sure how I would do, to be honest. As I’ve mentioned hundreds of times before, horror is really not my thing.)
If you are deeply in love with horror at its most horrifically horrifyingly horrible, then I’m sorry to tell you that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark turned out not to be so scary, after all. (Still too scary for the average four-year-old, though. Plenty of gruesome imagery. And if you’re bothered by the idea of thousands of spiders coming out of your face…Well, who wouldn’t be bothered by that! I’m just saying even if you’re not exactly scared, there is plenty of material in this movie sure to disturb you.)
But what really shocked me about the movie is what an excellent film it is. Truly, honestly, I never in a million years expected a kids’ horror movie released in the dog days of summer to be anywhere near this good. I love its atmospheric spookiness, its mindblowing cinematography, and most of all its extremely clever setting. What an incredible way to honor the source material. A+.
The Good:
This movie takes place in November of 1968. (Well, technically it starts on the evening of October 31st.) It weaves together several of the more prominent Scary Stories. Six stories are pointedly showcased, and there are definitely elements of some others scattered here and there (particularly if you consider the classic Stephen Gammell illustrations).
The frame story feels a little stale at first. There’s a haunted house, a tortured (deceased) girl, an evil book. (“You don’t tell the stories. The stories tell you.”) At first it seems like a more PG-13 rehash of that fun Goosebumps movie starring Jack Black (which we also like).
The movie turns out to be so much more than that, though. I love the careful crafting of this film on every level. But I’ll start with the screenplay. It is simply outstanding. The psychological horror builds and really sticks with you because the scariest parts are true. Something is wrong in this sleepy little town. Boys are disappearing and never coming back, or coming back damaged, irreparably injured, changed. The police won’t help. As the movie opens, we spot one such boy (proudly wearing his letter jacket), boasting to his friends that he’s about to “go kill Commies” because he’s just enlisted. He’s going to Vietnam.
I love this idea that the scariest stories are the ones we tell only in the dark. In the daylight, we have so many communal distractions and pleasant fictions, but at night we’re left with the nagging worry that something might be wrong. Are they lying to us? Is someone trying to hurt us? Is our town as nice a place to live as we think? Are we wrong to trust the authorities? Can we trust anyone?
As the movie opens, we hear everyone’s excitement about Halloween, all the fun spooky stuff on the radio and TV. But then sometimes the media gives us other information about the draft or the impending election (of President Nixon). What everybody wants to focus on is Halloween (such spooky fun), but the level of cognitive dissonance going on in this town is both familiar and unsettling.
The film invites us to think about the purpose, usefulness, and limitations of narrative, about stories we tell and stories we are told. Mill Valley has this creepy town legend about a witch who lived in a haunted house, but the story behind the myth turns out to be much scarier and grounded in awful reality. And the origin of this spooky, delightful town legend (how fun!) is rooted in a sickening, insidious cover up (less fun…no fun at all, in fact). The movie seems to suggest that part of the reason we tell ourselves these delightful fictions is to look away from what is truly awful, what we can’t face about ourselves and our society.
One clear message to kids is that you have to stop letting the story tell you. Take off your rose-colored glasses (or, in this case, put on your broken, cobwebby glasses, besmirched by experience), look clearly at what is really there, and start telling the truth. But don’t expect anybody to believe you because self-preserving fictions are far more comforting (and more fun)!
The film also focuses on social justice, the importance of empathy. There’s a late moment in which one of the protagonists is horribly mistreated while she’s mistaken for another person. She keeps yelling out that they’ve made a mistake, that she’s not the person in question. I wanted to yell back, “Oh yes you are!” If you’re being treated inhumanely and feel you don’t deserve it, stop and ask yourself, “Wait. Who does deserve it?” If anyone around you is being treated with unjust violence, then you are not safe. Something is wrong. But just because things shouldn’t be happening, doesn’t mean they aren’t. (They usually are.)
Obviously Vietnam is not the only alarming thing going on in 1968. The film also has a lot to say about racial profiling, mistreatment of the mentally ill, and a whole slew of things that are generally wrong in every place at every time that most people don’t want to acknowledge in the daylight when lots of fun stuff is going on to distract them.
Without digging into rich, spoiler-filled details, I can’t say much more about the wonderful screenplay which demands to be analyzed in depth. (Teachers should absolutely love this movie. If I were still teaching, I’d find a way to work it into my syllabus for sure.) I suppose I can say that the characters are also well drawn and entertaining, the dialogue is fairly snappy, and something exciting is always happening. The plot progresses quickly, steadily.
Best of all is the way the plot incorporates several of the short stories from the books. You could string them together using a simple frame story, but in this case, each separate episode becomes an essential component feeding back into the main storyline, advancing the plot, developing the characters and the themes. We get one coherent, cohesive story, and yet several (in the books stand-alone) scary stories are still beautifully showcased. Fans of the books should love the way the stories are presented here. I so admire the elegance with which each episode of horror speaks specifically to the inner demons and anxieties of the character who becomes the protagonist of that story-within-a-story. Adapting a beloved book for the screen is a tricky business. This adaptation is so well done. It captures the spirit of the books so beautifully, perfectly.
The other aspect of this film I fell completely in love with is its cinematography, both the beauty of its exquisitely framed, trickily lit shots and its masterful sense of visual storytelling and use of symbolism.
Cinematographer Roman Osin is a genius as far as I’m concerned. This may sound a bit obvious, but so much of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark takes place in the dark. Do you know how hard it is to photograph things in the dark? I do. Granted, it helps to have a good camera. (But if you, say, accidentally destroy your camera at Disney World and then temporarily replace it with a used professional series DSLR that happens to be twelve years old, you will find yourself really thinking about light level a lot. Trust me.)
Early in the movie we get an extremely long segment in a haunted house at night. There are no lights. It is literally dark. Yet the camera finds such fascinating variations of darkness, so many things (often beautiful things) to show us. This seriously impressed me, and it happened long before I realized how well written the story was.
Yes, this long stretch of darkness helps to create a spooky mood and increase suspense/tension. It’s wonderfully atmospheric! But more importantly (to me), just from a practical standpoint, sustained scenes of darkness are extremely hard to film, and the choice to go for this is so bold, so impressive. (Have you ever wanted portraits and hired a professional photographer who then suggested, “Okay, so let’s go to a haunted house at night and see what we can get in a couple of hours of total darkness”? If so, how did you afford this photographer?) Not only does Scary Stories make the bold choice to give us scenes shot in sustained darkness, but it makes them look so beautiful, so intriguing. It finds such variation in the shadows! In this aspect, it’s one of the most visually stunning films I’ve seen all year.
Also cool is all of the film’s visual symbolism, plus its delight in using artifacts that ground us in the period, and then also including the use of other period-signaling objects to make characters in the story aware of a still earlier period. Every time we’re like, “Hey look! It’s the 1960s,” they’re similarly gushing about telltale technology from a still earlier past. I also loved the multiple instances of characters literally being in conversation with the past or the story. What a way to honor a collection of folktales!
The music in the movie is also extremely cool. My entire family couldn’t stop singing, “Season of the Witch,” for the rest of the weekend. (By the end, even the four-year-old was singing it, and he didn’t go to the movie!) I don’t think I’ve ever not liked a Marco Beltrami score. Anna Drubich collaborated with him on this one. I’m completely unfamiliar with her previous work, but I like it here.
The cast is made up mostly of young actors. The biggest names are probably Lorraine Toussaint (somewhat disguised in a small but interesting role) and Dean Norris who plays the father of the protagonist. The other adult in the cast with a significant role is Gil Bellows who brings a nice lazy menace to (police) Chief Turner.
Most familiar to me among the young actors is Gabriel Rush whom I remember as Skotak from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. (He’s also in The Grand Budapest Hotel.) The others I didn’t really know, but I liked all of them. (Admittedly Rush’s Auggie was my favorite, but that’s possibly just because I knew the actor.) Michael Garza also gives a really strong performance as Ramón, and Austin Zajur is also pretty funny and compelling as Chuck. I wish we had seen a little more of Natalie Ganzhorn’s Ruth, (and maybe we will in a sequel), but she has two phenomenal scenes. She’s great at portraying distress. Most of the movie belongs to Zoe Margaret Colletti as Stella Nicholls. At times, I loved her performance, though occasionally, I thought she needed a little more vocal variety. (Is that a thing? Her line delivery always sounds the same.) Colletti reminded me overwhelmingly of Aileen Quinn’s Annie. Then later I discovered she actually was in the 2014 Annie (though not as Annie). Her face telegraphs sincerity, and overall her performance worked for me. I would definitely watch her in a sequel. Austin Abrams does a great job of making Tommy simultaneously repulsive and pathetic. (You watch and think, “I can’t stand that kid. I’m so worried about him!”)
Scariest Scene:
To me, only “The Big Toe” was genuinely scary, though all the other stories were extremely well done. (Well, maybe “The Dream” is also scary.)
Best Scene Visually:
Personally, I was so blown away by what the film does in the darkness of Halloween night (particularly inside that haunted house) that everything else was just icing on the cake to me. That first segment inside the haunted house is phenomenal. Also fantastic to behold is “The Dream.”
Personally, I was so blown away by what the film does in the darkness of Halloween night (particularly inside that haunted house) that everything else was just icing on the cake to me. That first segment inside the haunted house is phenomenal. Also fantastic to behold is “The Dream.”
Most Cringeworthy Scene:
There is one moment in “The Red Spot” that looks so creepy and seems so eerily plausible (especially to anyone who has ever been a teenager with less than flawless skin). This may be my favorite image of the movie because of the simplicity of its sheer hideousness.
Best Action Sequence:
This is tricky. Every one of the Scary Stories used features tons of action. (Terror tends to provoke a fight or flight response, after all.) But zeroing in on which of these sequences is best in terms of action is so difficult because no matter what is going on, the strength of the scene (what makes it scary, gives it emotional heft or psychological depth) is almost always primarily visual. This is an intensely visual movie. Is it scary and pulse pounding when Tommy is running through the field? Yes (especially if you are a child), but what happens after the chase is more memorable because of the way it looks, what we see. This is true in almost every story. The action is upstaged by the visual that arrives late to ensure the story packs a punch.
So honestly, in terms of pure action, I would probably zero in on the protagonists’ initial conflict with Tommy. The only thing chasing them at that point is Tommy, and he doesn’t look memorably horrifying. Yet.
The Negatives:
As I continue reflecting on the film, I think of more and more aspects that truly impressed me. Fans of the Scary Stories books really could not ask for a better, more loving film adaptation. We definitely plan to own this movie.
But it does have a few weaknesses. After the film, both my kids told me that they preferred my telling of “Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker” and found the eerie song I sing much spookier than the way the story unfolds in the movie. I also was disappointed not to hear my song (which I quickly realized was ridiculous since I made the tune up myself). Now granted, this is our favorite story, so take my criticism with a grain of salt when I tell you that I found this story’s presentation the weakest in the movie. I absolutely love the symbolism and learning what the story means personally to the character. But I do think it could have been spookier. Instead, it almost turns into a generic action scene. (I also thought it was weird to have a fireplace in the police station, but maybe it’s an historical building???)
Chief Turner, I thought, too, was so thinly drawn that he almost became a stereotype of a 1960s racist cop. I wanted to see more complexity in that character. (I guess we do get a slight plot twist in that all of his suspicions are not completely unfounded.)
Occasionally, I wondered, “Does this banter seem a bit forced?” But I could never positively tell myself that it did. In the same way, Zoe Margaret Colletti’s cadence and line delivery sometimes began to feel repetitive and monotonous. But then suddenly she’d have a moment, and I’d think, “What a great young actress!” So I’m not sure about that, either…
Overall:
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is an unexpectedly excellent film that has inspired me to start reading the wonderful Alvin Schwartz books to my younger son. I just asked him if he would like to do that, and he nodded yes, so I guess I’ll stop heaping praise on this fantastic movie now, head to the bookshelf, and prepare to scare my little boy.