Terrifying tales spring to vivid life in Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark

Monstrous creatures from terrifying tales come to life for a group of teens in Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, the new horror film produced by Guillermo del Toro. The movie is based on a series of children’s books from the 1980s by the late amateur folklorist Alvin Schwartz (he died in 1992), who drew upon common folklore and popular urban legends for his anthologies.

(Some spoilers below.)

Technically, Schwartz was a curator, collecting scary stories from all over and preserving those oral traditions on the page. Remember that classic campfire ditty, The worms crawl in the worms crawl out/the worms play pinochle on your snout? So did Schwartz. You’ll also find variations on the killer with a hook for a hand who preys on couples necking in parked cars. So, too, the hapless babysitter who discovers the call is coming from inside the house, along with plenty of other frightening fare. It’s all delivered in a breezy, conversational format, complete with tips on how to most effectively read the stories aloud to scare your friends. (The 2018 documentary Scary Stories delves more into Schwartz’s source material.)

While the books are technically aimed at kids, the material can be pretty dark, which is why the series has often been listed among the most challenged books by the American Library Association. People (parents especially) have objected to the violence in the Scary Stories series—and illustrator Stephen Gammell’s disturbingly surreal images only add to the potential nightmares. In fact, publisher Harper Collins released a new 30th-anniversary edition in 2011 that didn’t include Gammell’s original illustrations, causing an uproar among longtime fans.

Kids absolutely love these books, precisely because they are scary.

What those objecting adults seem not to understand is that kids absolutely love these books, precisely because they are scary. As Laura Miller observed in Slate, “What would-be regulators… want is not to protect children from books that might harm them, but to protect themselves from the knowledge that many children seek out and delight in the macabre,” adding, “To claim your right to deliberately scare yourself (even if it gives you nightmares) is to make a bid for self-determination.”

In short, the books are perfect fodder for del Toro, whose visually distinctive work has often centered on fairy tales and fantasy (Pan’s Labyrinth), classic horror (Crimson Peak, Mama), monsters (Hellboy, The Shape of Water), and the like. He signed on with CBS Films in 2016 to develop and produce a feature film adapted from Schwartz’s Scary Stories series, and he eventually tapped André Øvredal (Trollhunter) to direct.

But Scary Stories is also a challenging series to adapt for the silver screen. Del Toro has said his adaptation is not a standard anthology film. “Anthology films are always as bad as the worst story in them—they’re never as good as the best story,” he said during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July. “I remembered in Pan’s Labyrinth, I created a book called The Book of Crossroads. I thought it could be great if we had a book that reads you, and it writes what you’re most afraid of. Then the theme became the stories we tell each other.”

The first trailer dropped in March, revealing that various tales from the books are embedded within a broader narrative that combines a classic haunted house mythology with a historical murder mystery. The movie is set in the small American town of Mill Valley on Halloween 1968. High school nerd and aspiring writer Stella Nicholls (Zoe Colletti) and her friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) hatch a plan to ambush head bully Tommy Milner (Austin Abrams) and his gang in revenge for torments of Halloweens past. They bump into Ramón (Michael Garza) while on the run from Team Tommy, and the four take refuge in the local haunted house: the abandoned Bellows mansion.

“I thought it could be great if we had a book that reads you, and it writes what you’re most afraid of.”

As Stella tells Ramón, the Bellows family had a daughter named Sarah who was “different” in some mysterious way. They kept her locked up in a basement room, and her only contact with the outside world was telling her scary stories through the walls of her room to curious local children who came snooping around the house. Many of those children mysteriously disappeared. Sarah eventually hanged herself, and the house has been vacant ever since.

But Stella and Ramón find the secret room where Sarah lived, along with her book of stories, said to have been written in the blood of the children she purportedly killed. And a curious Stella takes the book home, awakening Sarah’s vengeful spirit. Anyone who was in the Bellows house at the time is a target—not just Stella, Ramón, Auggie, and Chuck, but also Tommy and Chuck’s older sister, Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn). One by one, new stories featuring each of them appear as if by magic in Sarah’s book. Then the stories come to life in the real world, from Harold the scarecrow and a corpse looking for its missing big toe, to the Jangly Man and the Pale Lady (all fan favorites).

Scary Stories is rated PG-13, the better to appeal to the book series’ younger fan base, so it isn’t as gruesome as one might find in a typical horror film. There’s an innocence here, not something you’ll usually find in the genre. Other than the metaphysical musings on the power of stories, it’s not a particularly profound film, which is in keeping with the deliberately simple prose of the books. But there are plenty of ominously foreboding scenes, classic jump scares, and genuinely gross and/or terrifying moments to delight fans. The only surprising thing is that the studio released it now instead of holding it for Halloween. I think Schwartz would be pleased at how well the film captures the spooky campfire sprit of his books.

Listing image by YouTube/CBS Films

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