Scary stories movie11/13/2023 ![]() ![]() There are lots of gruesome villains to send chills down your spine. It takes multiple stories and weaves them into a fully formed narrative. Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark is yet another in a line of great horror movies this year. The supporting characters have a wide range of effectiveness, but Zoe Margaret Colletti is great as Stella, offering a strong, smart female lead who isn’t limited to the “final girl” stereotype. The kids are of an unspecified age, but they feel like they are roughly 14 or 15. I don’t know why, but the small-town Halloween vibe makes it feel like a lot of the PG and PG-13 horror from the 1980s. Some parents may disagree, but it opens with a group of kids getting ready for their last Halloween. This film feels like a good gateway film into horror for children. Ramon is subjected to harassment for being Hispanic, but ultimately it doesn’t change his fate and other than his car being trashed with racial epithets, which forces him to stay in town another night. This forms a very minor, but ultimately unimportant plot point. The film is set in 1968 (though the year has no real bearing on the story) with Nixon in the middle of a reelection and young men being sent to fight in Vietnam. If it were lifted out, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. There is an attempt to add social commentary into the film, but it feels forced. Fans of the books (or the illustrations) will recognize Harold the scarecrow, or the large woman with the pale face and black eyes from “The Dream.” “The Dream” as a story is not well fleshed out, so screenwriters Dan and Kevin Hageman did their job, and turned the pale faced woman into an adorable real-life monster. The most important part of the film is that Gammell’s drawings were well represented. But in this format, each story amounts to maybe ten minutes, with characters and mythology that have already been established. A lot of them probably wouldn’t even make a satisfying twenty minute short. But the stories are often only a page or two long, and are not well formed. It would have been easy to make this an anthology, and just retell the stories in the books. Scary Stories does a great job blending multiple stories into one film. Each time a story is written in the book – right before Stella’s eyes – someone else meets a grim fate. It soon becomes clear that the book itself is haunted, when Stella discovers a fresh story being written about Tommy… and Tommy disappears. A mysterious force unlocks the door and Stella takes the book with her. While down there, Stella discovers Sarah’s book of scary stories. So Stella and her friends go investigate the house, and are followed by Tommy, who locks them in Sarah’s room. It was said that she hanged herself with her own hair. She used to tell scary stories to kids through the wall, until rumors persisted that she was responsible for poisoning area children. All images of her were removed, and she was never let out of her basement room. ![]() ![]() Sarah, the daughter, was the scourge of the family. The 100+ year old house was owned by the Bellows family, who built a mill that basically built the town. An instant attraction between Stella and Ramon causes her to invite him to a “real” haunted house. Tommy chases them with deadly intent, and they take refuge at a drive-in theater, hiding in the car of Ramon, a Hispanic drifter. It starts on Halloween, when the trio play a trick on the town bully, Tommy. The film version of Scary Stories follows Stella and her friends Auggie and Chuck. ![]()
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