(There’s an Indestructible Man poster in her bedroom, a film which is… really not very good.) Colletti is a fine lead, playing a creative and emotional teenager who respects the power of stories and has unexpectedly kooky taste in horror films. And there’s also no sense in critiquing the film for giving us exactly what we want by cutting to the chase.īut in a story as simplistic as “evil book, stories real, run from ghosts” it falls to the characters to keep our interest alive. Like Goosebumps and Annabelle Comes Home before it, it’s a Pandora’s Box framing device where the set-up is contrived but efficient, getting all the monsters out as quickly as possible because there’s no sense in belaboring the point. There’s very little to be said about the overarching story of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And naturally, those stories come to life and drag each of the characters into their own personal hell. The house belonged to Sarah Bellows, a child-murderer who wrote terrifying tales of her own, and when Stella removes those scary stories (presumably to tell to the dark) from the basement, new stories start appearing in the book. Scary Stories stars Zoe Margaret Colletti ( Wildlife) as Stella, a teenaged horror enthusiast in 1968 who, on Halloween night, breaks into the spooky old house on the edge of town with her best friends. There’s no shortage of excellent scary moments in this movie, but you’ll have to trudge through some tedium to get there. Schwartz’s stories are intact, and the influence of Gammell’s signature imagery is everywhere. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the movie, comes courtesy of director André Øvredal ( The Autopsy of Jane Doe), and it’s an overlong, unconvincingly nostalgic framing device for several adaptations of the books’ most iconic tales. Even Schwartz’s most innocuous tales looked utterly unwholesome when viewed through Gammell’s eyes.īut now we have all-new eyes, and although they owe fealty to both Schwartz and Gammell’s original work, they seem a little hackier than before. Gammell’s disturbingly detailed horror imagery revealed itself, often quite unexpectedly, from Rorschach splatters of drippy ink, as though they were being painted right in front of our eyes by a diseased imagination. The book series featured short stories by Alvin Schwartz, and they were frequently gruesome, but Stephen Gammell’s eery illustrations were the real nightmare fuel. It’s difficult to say just how many people were kept up late at night as little kids, afraid to turn off their flashlights and emerge from under their blankets, for fear of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
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