Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019) - Review

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019). Starring Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza and Gil Bellows.

One star. (SPOILERS)


So if you were a kid in the 1980s, chances are you read the Alvin Schwartz anthology novels of the same name.  Anytime you received a Troll book order form at school, there was the familiar sight of a scary zombie with a pipe in his mouth or gray-scaled trees with dark figures walking beneath.  I always got a kick out of the fact that our teachers never said squat about these books (in fact, they had them available for checkout in their rooms).  So imagine my surprise when I read on the Wikipedia entry that these books had made it to several "most controversial" lists over the last few decades.  This is credited to busybody librarians and parents who generated the controversy (the content wasn't close to being that dark).  Guess I missed that one somehow.

Anyway, I assumed this would be an anthology flick. That's how the books are structured.  But instead, we get a bunch of Gen Z kids and a story setting in the late 1960s.  If it wasn't for the cars and the constant references, you wouldn't know this.  That and the fact that phones are visibly absent.  You can tell, because the actors themselves look lost without an electronic device stuck to their hands.  I have no idea why this wasn't just set in modern times, but whatever.  

The characters are completely unlikable as a whole.  Whether it's the local jock-bully Tommy Milner, the local new kid Ramón, the main character Stella, or their geeky friends, it's hard to have any emotional investment in these kids.  This may be due to the current modern horror phenomena of two-dimensional characters, which is prevalent in post-pandemic flicks.  I don't know if this is a reflection on the actors or simply bad writing.  

The device used to tell the stories revolves around the main characters coalescing in a spooking house of long-dead witch Sarah Bellows.  Upon finding her journal, the group begans to experience stories held within the book.  Some of these include the toe story or the Me-Tie-Doughty stories from the novels.  The book also begins to feed on the fears of the teenagers, ultimately leading to a showdown with the malevolent spirit of Bellows.  These subplots sound interesting, but the characters are too monotone to care about in the first place.

Another example of a typical PG-13 scary movie in the modern age.  Watch only if you're that bored or curious.