By Melissa Antoinette Garza
Like a bunch of kids, I read the Scary Stories book series as a kid. Oh yes! I was a badass. I read R.L. Stine’s Fear Street and Christopher Pike. Hell, I was hanging with Stephen King and Clive Barker novels when I was a baby Missy. I liked all things spooky and strange. I didn’t care if it was off the chart flicks like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) and THE EVIL DEAD (1981) or tame stuff like MONSTER SQUAD (1987) and THE GATE (1987). If it was in the realm of horror, I was a happy gal.
To a great degree, I’m still the same way. I love the violent, crazy, R-rated sexploitation horror gems, but I can jump into a soft-scare, teenybopper movie just the same.
Going in I expected to like SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK (2019). The trailers looked pretty decent and the child actors seemed to have skills. I was cautiously optimistic and for the most part, I was dead-on with what I thought. The movie was pretty good.
It takes place in 1968, but other than some commentary on Vietnam and a whole bunch of Nixon footage, it doesn’t capture anything about the 60s. The kids all act very modern. With the exception of some vintage clothing and a hospital that has a bit of an old school vibe, the set design failed. Too bad Tarantino didn’t wander over from ONCE UPON A TIME …IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) to help these cats out because he nailed the late 60s.
Another area SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK, fails is with the female lead’s back story. Young Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) has a strained relationship with her dad, Roy (Dean Norris). Stella’s mom bailed and everyone blames Stella for it. She thinks Roy does too, but he doesn’t. He’s just hurt, quiet and a burly tough guy who doesn’t like talking about his feelings – and you know what that means: TOXIC MASCULINITY! Take down the patriarchy, folks! Bwahahahahahahaha – Chill. I’m just joking! He’s just a dad trying to protect his kid in the wrong way. There’s no underlying message here. I’m just being an asshole.
Stella’s story fails because she is the catalyst for everyone else going away when she steals a haunted book. Other than a strange moment where the film acknowledges this major coincidence, but then walks it back, it’s all but ignored. In the end, they try to address it once again, but it’s done in a horrible way that makes no sense.
It all begins on Halloween when Stella and her friends Chuck (Austin Zajur) and Auggie (Gabriel Rush) decide to get revenge on a shithead bully named Tommy (Austin Abrams). Admittedly, the trio’s plans are dumb. The kids are idiots. They egg Tommy’s car and throw a bag of shit on fire into his window. He crashes into nearby bushes and is none too happy. That on its own isn’t bad, but they need an escape plan, and these cats don’t have one.
Tommy, his douche crew and Chuck’s pretty sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn) who was on a date with Tommy for some reason all start going after Stella and friends. They end up at a drive-in and Auggie, Chuck and Stella hop into Ramón’s (Michael Garza) car. Ramón has the hots for Stella and she’s feeling it too, but before anything can get going Tommy boy returns to shake shit up.
They get away and Stella takes the boys to the town’s notorious haunted house. The folklore surrounds a dead chick named Sarah Bellows (Kathleen Pollard) who was disowned by her family and thrown in solitary confinement. She was an albino and ostracized by her evil relatives. They blamed her for killing a bunch of kids, but there’s a bit of a twist going on.
Stella finds Sarah’s book and is a dummy. She takes it and this is where Stella’s back story turns to shit. So, we’re supposed to feel bad for this girl because everyone blames her because mommy bailed. We don’t see her mother hit-the-road, but it’s safe to say it probably wasn’t really Stella’s fault. She’s a kid and doesn’t seem all that bad. She’s a bit annoying, but weren’t we all at that age? That said, she is responsible for everything afterwards. She stole something that wasn’t hers. It was haunted as fuck and is the reason for her friends being killed. That’s on her! In the scene where she says as much, Ramón cuts her off and tells her she’s wrong. She’s not wrong. He just wants a little something-something.
So everything goes nuts and ghost Sarah Bellows starts writing new stories in her book to fuck with all the kids including Tommy. He didn’t even step foot in her house, so she just must hate bullies.
The different monsters that emerge from the tales are splendid. The special effects are very cool and match the theme of the illustrations within the books perfectly. The tales are told well and sort of in a GOOSEBUMPS (2015) style approach, though admittedly much darker.
When Chuck is approached by the Pale Lady (Mark Steger), she’s fucking awesome. She was my favorite part. Everywhere he turned, she was there. It was weird, it was off-putting and it was tremendous! I love that scene and kudos to Zajur for showing some real panic on his face. To make it work, he needed to emote like a motherfucker. He did and it was fab!
Still, there were some side stories that went nowhere and needed to be fleshed out. Chief Turner (Gil Bellows) had some promise. He was a racist cop who harassed the shit out of Ramón because of his ethnicity, and he needed a better sendoff. He was the closest we had to a human antagonist. He was far worse than Tommy because Tommy was still a kid. He was a fucktard, but he could potentially grow out of it. Fuzz Turner was a grown dipshit who got off on throwing his power around. An ironic death was warranted. We didn’t get one and rather he was just used as a segue into a chase between the Jangly Man (Troy James) and Ramón.
The conclusion finds Stella and Ramón going back to Sarah’s house in effort to stop the stories from killing them. The final scene is a plea for a sequel that though not warranted, probably wouldn’t be dreadful.
If you have nothing better to do, there are worse flicks you can see than this one. It’s not as good as I wanted it to be. I think a straight-out anthology would have been better, but this was decent. None of the actors were particularly bad. The monsters were cool. Harold the Scarecrow (Mark Steger) made for some great scenes. It could have been more if the filmmakers picked a lane. It was like they wanted to make something terrifying, but not so terrifying that kids couldn’t see it. This back-and-forth really messed with the flow.
For example, some scenes with Colletti are just too intense. There’s a little of Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy in her when Stella is talking to her father from the police station and when she’s freaking out to Ramón one-on-one. Those scenes are believable and Zoe sells the fuck out of them, but the problem is that it is too serious. The darkest part of this flick isn’t as scary as the lightest moments in NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984). NoES earned those scenes between Nancy and her father. SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK didn’t. They were thrown in for dramatic effect, but it doesn’t fit the tone. It would be like having an upbeat dance number in SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982). It could be the best tap routine you ever saw, but it still doesn’t work within the scope of the film.
Where it does work is with nostalgia, make-up, CGI and a few basic tales that are compelling enough to hold interest.
Scared Stiff Rating: 5.5/10
