Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

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     Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a horror film based on the short stories collected under the same name. The movie adapts several of these stories into one narrative, in which a group of teenagers (Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Austin Zajur, and others) locates a book in an abandoned house. After taking the book home, the teenagers discover that new stories, featuring themselves as characters, mysteriously appear in its pages—stories that end with terrifying deaths.

     Scary Stories reads as horror-lite, designed to appeal more to teens and youngsters than to adults (in keeping with the target audience of the original short stories). It lands somewhere in between the likes of The House with a Clock in Its Walls, which aims directly at kids, and It, an adult movie that balances very grown-up scares with wide-eyed teen innocence. In other words, while some of its images and sequences seem far too frightening for a kid audience, Scary Stories is also too mild to appeal to a more mature crowd; it’s something in-between.

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     I, as a self-proclaimed horror fan, was hoping for something a lot scarier, or maybe just something that would stick with me longer. But by design, Scary Stories comes off more creepy than horrifying or dismaying. Don’t get me wrong, some individual segments of the film are plenty scary—especially one sequence in which the “pale lady” slowly corners one of the teens in a hospital hallway—but even in those moments, Scary Stories seems content to tell its spooky campfire stories without pushing any boundaries.

     When it comes to character, Scary Stories does the bare minimum. Horror films don’t always need rich character development, of course, but often they at least use characters to cut the tension with humor or violent catharsis. Scary Stories doesn’t make much of an effort in either direction; we’ve seen it all before in other movies.

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     Scary Stories’s final act culminates with a “solve the crime/appease the entity” sequence a la The Ring, in which the characters attempt to prevent their own deaths by fulfilling whatever need has been left unfulfilled for the supernatural being in question. I’m never a huge fan of these endings; they usually slow the action down when they should be speeding it up. I still wasn’t a fan in Scary Stories, but it at least succeeds in tidying up the story, lending the audience some closure and giving its characters a moment of agency.

     FINAL VERDICT: Scary Stories might not be scary or charismatic enough to make much of an impact on genre enthusiasts, but it passes as mildly entertaining, teen-friendly horror.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is rated PG-13 for terror/violence, disturbing images, thematic elements, language including racial epithets, and brief sexual references.

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