A new franchise to compete with IT and Stranger Things this is not. But Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a heck of a lot of fun, and plenty spooky enough to deserve a place in your horror library.
Much like the collections of short stories that inspired the title, this film works best in stringing together a more or less cohesive narrative between scary episodes. Though one might have supposed the source material could fit better into a serial show, screenwriters Dan and Kevin Hageman (writers of The Lego Movie and Hotel Transylvania) have attempted the difficult and thankless task of making a new story that incorporates disparate elements of someone else's perverse mind. What we get is a sort of screwball coming-of-age movie centered on a Loser's Club of misfit kids -- only too typical for the genre.
They discover -- yes, while sneaking into the spooky old house of the town's founding family -- a book of scary stories and awaken the angry spirit of the book's writer, the tormented (and demented) daughter of the founding family, whose family they had tortured her to prevent her revealing their evil deeds (poisoning the town with mercury). Weird, right? I know. But not nearly as weird as what this girl writes. She continues telling her stories, which bring nightmarish plagues on the town intent on killing still more children: monsters of various shapes and sizes with missing or extra limbs, usually intent on eating their prey. (At least, they appear hungry; but the children they take seem to disappear wholly, and the ending suggests a sequel in which they might be rescued.)
The whole thing smacks of Guillermo del Toro -- producer and story creator -- for both better and worse, and the story of Sarah Bellows's book of stories is the stuff of funky fairytale. Nostalgia seems a strong design point here, but the film works hard to subvert any illusions about the "good ol' days" myth Trumpian America insists on idealizing. Indeed, the film takes place on the eve of Richard Nixon's election, and his campaign posters have swastikas painted across them! Police hound young Latino man Ramon for dodging the draft (and yes, Vietnam is pointedly identified as the backdrop to the ensuing weirdness here), and racist slurs are hurled his way by both the bully and the cops.
Similarly, the scares are creepy but often rely on surprise rather than earned disturbance. The monsters themselves -- surprising, yes, but also pretty gross -- look less like Stephen Gammell's horrifying illustrations than like del Toro's brainchildren of Pan's Labyrinth. I definitely would have preferred more atmosphere in this movie than nostalgia, and more of the raw, shadowy horror of those original drawings. Their aura was pre-Internet; it was as if you could still see the spilled ink or even graphite shavings on the paper. They felt fresh and violent, crafted for your eyes alone in some darkened closet by a deranged mind. The images of this film, on the other hand, feel like what they are: latex, bodysuits, prosthetics and movement artists, and some handy dandy big-budget CGI.
Then again, I remember precious little of those stories that kept me up nights as a kid, other than some specific images of a splay-legged scarecrow, a spider-infested boil on a girl's face, a pale smiling figure with a mouth far too large. Their precise lines blurred from memory, this movie plays like a Greatest Hits album of what we remember, which makes even the scares feel strangely pleasant, a sort of familiar horror we can revisit and appreciate anew.
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