Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Ovredal)

[Grouchy]

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[Grouchy]

It's a tough movie to grade because while the Horror sequences are tense and visually striking as hell (Ovredal's previous movie The Autopsy of Jane Doe was a masterclass of closed room suspense) the plot is as lame and dull as they get. This is based on a series of books of Horror stories for kids and teenagers that are apparently huge in the US but I'd never heard about them before. The script by the Hageman brothers attempts to join all these monster-based tales into an overarching plot about teenagers who find a cursed book of short stories and experience the gruesome fates I assume fans of the books are already familiar with. And that's actually a good idea, but the wooden characters, the silly and endlessly expository dialogue and the predictability of the whole plot bring it down from what could have been a great Halloween flick.

Credit where credit's due, one thing that was actually unexpected is that not all the kids come back to life when the villain is defeated, but that's actually left ambiguous for sequel purposes? I guess.

[Wryan]

If you are interested, the original point of the books is represented in the attempts of the author-editor, Alvin Schwartz, to collect in one place a new folklore for America, as we didn't really have the several-centuries-old stories of myth and folklore common to many other countries, especially European countries. What we did have, though, were somewhat well-known urban legends that persisted over a few decades and varied a bit by region and subculture. His idea, then, was to treat these urban legends as our folklore and structure anthology stories around that. Although the books are often considered children's stories, the bibliography sections in the back are generous and surprisingly rigorous.

Having said that, the vast majority of fans of the stories are not quite as interested in Schwartz's bibliographies and intentions as they are in Stephen Gammell's legendary artwork, which cared not a bit about presenting wild, surreal images clearly too raw and nightmarish for children under a certain age. The images are what most people remember.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but the stories and artwork certainly made a nest in my pysche. I would have preferred an anthology movie myself, I think. But I doubt it would have been given the greenlight and may, indeed, not have worked well as a stand-alone movie anyway.