Film Review: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is mixed bag of scares, stories, and spooky monsters, a film with incredible potential that wallows in dullness by stretching its audience potential too wide across its 108-minute runtime.

Director: André Øvredal  Starring: Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, Austin Abrams, Dean Norris, Gil Bellows, Lorraine Toussaint

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is based on a series of short horror stories for children by Alvin Schwartz, all of which draw heavily from folklore and urban legends. Guillermo Del Toro – director of folklore fantasy horror, Pan’s Labyrinth – was brought on board in 2016 to develop the story and possibly direct, with final directing duties taken up by André Øvredal.

Fans of horror and folk-horror films will know Øvredal for his masterful work in writing and directing the found-footage film, Trollhunter, and as director of the criminally underrated 2016 supernatural-horror film, The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Both these directors – and the films between them – have shown themselves capable of absolutely terrifying and unsettling audiences outside traditional horror narratives, so it’s distressingly disappointing that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark feels like lifeless.

The film is set in small-town America, 1968, though it’s a 1968 that feels written by someone in their 20s – modern speech, modern style, modern problems, modern relationship dynamics, modern humour. If you forget the timewarp setting, you’ll be reminded at various points throughout the film by egregious mentions of Richard Nixon, Vietnam, and watered-down racism, the latter of which feels strangely dialled down to avoid it becoming a central plot element.

It’s Halloween night, and horror-obsessed teenager, Stella Nicholls (Zoe Colletti), paranoid realist Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and wise-cracking Chuck (Austin Zajur) decide to play a prank on slick-haired jock bully, Tommy (Austin Abrams). After Tommy and his gang of baseball-bat waving greasers chase the trio into a drive-in movie theatre, our heroes take refuge in the car of cool, calm, and collected Ramón (Michael Garza).

We’re given around five minutes of dialogue that establishes the dynamics of the group, and a few nudges of character development that feel more important than they turn out to be. Then Stella recommends the group visit the abandoned, haunted house and hanging site of local serial killer, Sarah Bellows, where the group discover a secret chamber and a book of horror stories written in blood.

The narrative then follows Stella as she attempts to unravel the mysteries of the Bellows house and the deadly book which seems to be causing everyone she knows to mysteriously disappear. If this sounds like the blurb to a Goosebumps book then you wouldn’t be too far off, which is also the main reason the film fails to establish any consistent sense of tone – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark can’t decide if it’s for kids, adults, or adults wanting to reminisce about a time that never existed.

The inconsistency of the film is best on show throughout the horror sections. There are hints that this film could have been a remarkably bizarre and surreal horror experience, with a school-bathroom scene and a claustrophobic hallway in a hospital proving to be pure nightmare fuel, again deflated by the sort of slapstick horror-comedy reactions you’d expect if the film were actually Ace Ventura and The Scary Story Book.

Instead, the film settles for a collection of mostly pointless jump scares and a few cringeworthy creatures that we never really learn anything about, and a score that seems designed for this very purpose – frequent bouts of prolonged silence followed by sharp strings begin to feel tired after the first handful of moments. Zoe Colletti does her best to carry the majority of the film with a bit of Scooby Doo authenticity, and Austin Zajur provides the bulk of the comedy – channelling Jonah Hill from Superbad – while Dean Norris and Gil Bellows are painfully underused as the primary adult actors.

This all combines into a film that feels stagnant and overworked – character chemistry feels clinical at times, the tone of the film shifts from childlike innocence to graphic adult realism and back again, and everything feels glossy, slick, and manufactured. While Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark could have been a pathway into horror for younger audiences or a nostalgic trip in time for adult audiences, it decides to be neither – instead just a mildly entertaining and instantly forgettable film that always feels like it’s playing it safe, and wasting the potential of two brilliant horror masters.

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