Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

It’s Halloween, 1968. Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), a horror-loving outsider with the ambition of becoming a writer, convinces her two friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) to visit the spooky old Bellows mansion at the edge of town, a place connected to more than just one story of a haunting. Well, they’ll have to visits the place after they’ve played a prank on town bully Tommy (Austin Abrams), and have had to hide in the car of hot teenage drifter Ramón (Michael Garza).

That visit to the house, now accompanied by Ramón, who rather hits it off with Stella, doesn’t go too well, and not just because Tommy locks them into the cellar. Turns out the place is at least as haunted as everyone says; and while the kids escape the thing that goes bump in that particular night, things only become worse in the following days and nights, for Stella took a book of handwritten stories from the house, stories that now turn into reality on her and her friends.

Apparently, not everyone loved André Øvredal’s adaptation (as produced and co-written by the great Guillermo del Toro) of the beloved collections of horrific American and British folk tales as retold by Alvin Schwartz as much as I did, but I can’t find any flaw with the film at all, unless one thinks it strictly needed to be an anthology movie. I do appreciate most everything in the film at hand, not just that it is teen-oriented horror that doesn’t try to be so cool it can only ever end up uncool, but that it actually tries to speak to very precise anxieties of very specific kids, using some clichés in the character set-up but from then on out developing these characters and what they are afraid of with all seriousness.

At the same time, the film also grounds the horror in a very specific place and time, as well as the social realities of the characters – including the daily casual racism facing Ramón even from those people who are otherwise not horrible human beings (something that pop-cultural portrayals of racism often avoids showing) – not as the main thrust of the film but as something that can’t help but define parts of a person’s world.

Stories are, after all, connected to the reality they are told in, and the film is all about stories, obviously specifically horror stories, why we tell them, how we tell them, but also, particularly fitting in a film based on folklore retellings, how stories shape our interpretation of the world around us, and may very well shape the world around us in turn, and not always in the best way, as well as the way a creepy story can mask some horrors of the real world instead of revealing them.


But even ignoring this part of the film – even if I’m not sure I’d want to – Scary Stories is pretty wonderful, Øvredal handling the macabre tales in the movie with his usual good timing and sense for creating a creepy mood (turns out that works from Norwegian fjords, to morgues, to Midwestern small towns for him), and a flair for showing just the right amount of the weird stuff. I found myself particularly intrigued by the film’s use of colour, often using traditionally warm colours in connection with the supernatural and the creepy, perhaps suggesting how much more real and alive a story can feel than drab reality.