Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark

It seems that the Halloween season is beginning early this year. The Alamo Drafthouse is planning a great time for all with their annual even. There is a great amount of flicks coming out and this week has seen the release of the highly anticipated Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Personally I have been waiting for this flick for a while being a fan of the original stories by Allan  Schwartz and growing up during the banning of the books in the 80s while in elementary school and seeing their rise to immortality in the hands and eyes of readers like myself on the playgrounds, and this movie gives these stores a new meaning to that statement. 

Following his genre hits Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe director André Øvredal has joined genre master and Academy Award Winner Guillermo del Toro as producer of the film inspired by the infamous literary trilogy.

Now you will notice that I said Inspired. Well that is due to the fact that while there are many references to the books they aren’t exactly the same. 

Del Toro made the decision not to make the flick into an anthology movie in order to avoid comparisons to films like Creepshow and Trick R Treat and to go in a different direction. 

Now that direction makes me feel that the movie is a crossbreed between Hulu’s Castle Rock and the Goosebumps movie in the fact that the movie follows a trio of teenagers while enjoying what they feel will be their last night of Trick or Treating confront the town bully and meet a young outcast and decide to go to the local Haunted House and tell the local urban legend.

Our main character Stella, a local horror fan who is also in conflict after the abandonment of her mother, finds and steals a book belonging to Sarah Bellow, the local centerpiece of the legend. 

Fascinated by the stories Stella soon sees that the book writes itself with the fears of the people that it encounter and these fears are based on the stories that the victims have heard in the past. 

Stella and her friends now must stop the stories from happening while solving the mystery of Sarah Bellows and her magic book. 

Now I feel that it is more appropriate to say that the inspiration of the book takes the form of Easter Eggs as while the stories take life form that aren’t the same as the book and are completely different in their outcomes which makes it interesting for those of us familiar with the stories and their outcomes. 

That being said the film is in many ways predictable and runs the same as many of the films that you can find today with the Conjuring and Insidious films. 

Younger viewers will get a kick out of the Jump Scares and the suspense but I feel that they will find the flow of the film is slow in getting to the plot and may get board early on but when the scares begin they are good. 

I have to express my disappointment with the references to the book in the fact that there are too few of them. While the use of Harold and "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker" and the others are nice there are so many more that I would have liked to be seen. 

Granted The Hook has been done to Death but I would have liked to have seen The Thing and Wonderfull Sausage being shown through the eyes of the directors. 

Those issues aside this was not a bad flick and I can see it having a long life on the streaming sites especially around Halloween.

2 Dead Bodies

2 Disappeared Bodies

1 Disembodiment 

5 Beasts

Spiders

Stalking 

Stabbing

Arms Roll

Legs Roll

Torso Rolls 

And 

Head Rolls

3 Stars 

Check It out