![]() ![]() As must happen with these kinds of movies, the cast end up at a haunted house, where they find a secret room behind a secret door, with a secret book and a forbidden incantation. Their paths cross at a drive-in showing of George Romero’s seminal “Night of the Living Dead” and Ramón’s car becomes an incidental safe space after Stella, Auggie and Chuck assault longtime antagonist Tommy with a flaming bag of human poo in the film’s few moments of genuinely well-crafted character developing. While Stella and her best – and only – friends Chuck (Austin Zajur) and Auggie (Gabriel Rush) plotting revenge against the neighborhood bully Tommy (Austin Abrams), out-of-towner Ramón (Michael Garza) drives into the picture with a secret. It’s 1968 and in some small Pennsylanvia suburb, Stella (Zoe Colletti) readies for Halloween. What doesn’t work so well is the larger central narrative that weaves these smaller stories together. They won’t quite terrify the hardcore horror fans but are certain to give younger audience members looking to pursue a career as a horror junkie a nice introductory bump. Through a combination of faithful, practical effects-driven creature design and a classically suspenseful tone, Øvredal’s builds unsettling tableaus. As far as a PG-13 horror adaptation, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark showcases plenty of dark delights with the various translations of a half-dozen or so of the book’s shorts translated masterfully to screen. ![]() Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe director André Øvredal’s adaptation largely manages to capture the eerie allure of Schwartz’s best passages but forced to patch them onto a milquetoast central narrative, his tale becomes one of dizzying peaks and valleys. Coupled with Stephen Gammell’s drawings, a splattering of acid-influenced black-and-white gothic art pocked with American splotches of red, white, and blue, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” were OG nightmare fuel for a whole generation of kiddos looking to get their kicks with a good bedtime scare. A dark mirror reflection of Shel Silverstein whimsy and optimism, Schwartz’s bleak poems were outlandish and spooky, often eliciting Cronenbergian body horror and a sense of cruel recompense to disturbing effect. Few threaded the needle between Stein’s adolescent-aimed novellas and King’s more mature themes better than Alvin Schwartz with his 1981 shorts collection “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”. Stine’s ‘Goosebumps’, devouring forbidden stories of devious child heroes and things that go bump in the night, before graduating to Steven King works. Growing up in the 90’s, scholastic horror was all the rage. ![]()
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