SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK by Urizon

Spooky scary skeletons may send shivers down your spine, but will PG 13 horror do the same? I know I know, this is a horror movie based off from children’s horror books, so I really shouldn’t expect Guillermo Del Toro's best work or a horror masterpiece. Even still, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed by the big screen adaption of Alvin Schwartz's “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark."

   Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark tells the story of a group of teens who, one Halloween while visiting a haunted house, stumble upon the story book of one of the daughters who lived there, Sarah Bellows. Sarah was mostly kept as a secret from the rest of the world. No pictures existed of her and she was kept in a hidden room. Children would go up to the wall and she would tell them stories, though all of the children that heard them went missing. Upon finding her book in present time, the teens are now caught in a deadly situation as stories have begun writing themselves in the book, stories about them that involve their death. Will they be able to solve the mystery of the book before it’s too late?

   This movie is a very strange animal for me. It seemed advertised as a normal horror movie, but is based off from children’s horror books. The horror in this just doesn’t always work for me because of that. You sometimes have imagery that might just be a tad too creepy for kids, but then not scary enough for adults. It makes it hard to tell who this is marketed towards. Then there is the screenplay which just felt like it was meant for a younger audiences.

   That’s not to say the movie is bad though. There is some pretty unsettling imagery in the movie, and the designs are pretty cool. While the story isn’t perfect, I did enjoy it and certainly don’t regret seeing it. If there ends up being a sequel, I would probably see that too, but it isn’t one I would seek out to own or anything.

   Let me start with the characters. The actors are all relatively unknown, at least as far as I can tell. Honestly, they do a really good job with their roles. We have Zoe Margaret Colleti as our main lead, Stella Nicholls. Stella is that character that fits into the not like other girls role a bit. She isn’t one of the popular kids and is really into writing scary stories and horror movies. She’s fine. None of the characters are super amazing in my opinion, and they all sort of fall into stereotypical tropes.

   Next is Michael Garza as Ramón Morales. Again, he’s fine. He is driving through the town home day and ends up helping the others in the group when they hide in his car from a bully. People are racist to him all of the time. He kind of has the misunderstood bad boy vibe. He drives a nice car, wears a leather jacket and carries a switch blade, but has a heart of gold and is really a very nice person. Really Ramón gets a lot he doesn’t deserve in this movie. He is constantly being harassed by racists, he gets involved with the main group which then gets him involved with the book. I feel bad for him. Ramón and Stella also start to form this romance, but it is weird because he seems so much older than she does at times. Like they will be in scenes together and she looks maybe like 15 and he looks to be in his 20s. I know this isn’t the case, but it is just really weird.

   Gabriel Rush plays August “Auggie" Hilderbrandt. I liked him all right. He is the geek or nerd of the group. A bit more serious and trying to stop the others in the group from doing reckless things. Then finally is Chuck Steinberg, played by Austin Zajur. He was all right. Chuck was the really weird, quirky kid of the group. He was decently funny, but sometimes was pushing it with being too weird. Like I have said, all of the acting is actually well done, just the writing is a bit off and the characters fall into the obvious stereotypes and clichés a lot. Included in this is the character of Tommy Milner, played by Austin Abrams. He is such a stereotypical, unforgivable, unlikable bully character. They never do anything to make him seem like a better person. It would’ve helped a bit if they had done something more with him.

   As I said, the imagery is sometimes unsettling. The monsters that come to life from the story have some nice designs that fit right in with a Guillermo Del Toro movie. A stand out for me is The Toe Monster. It is this corpse who is looking for its big toe. It sounds a bit silly, and really is, but I love the design. Very eerie. For the most part, all of the monsters do this thing where they don’t need to rush to get who they are after. They know they will get the person, they don’t need to run. The exception to this is also probably the weakest one in the movie to me, The Jangly Man. He breaks the trend by being super fast and just sort of goofy. He is supposed to be scary, and again, maybe for children he would be.  Part of the issue with him is the CGI. It really doesn’t look all that great. It’s a shame, in a movie full of interesting designs, the one that is supposed to be one of the more major monsters falls flat.

   Speaking of falling flat, Sarah Bellows does in a way as well. Very slight possible spoiler for the movie, but the whole time they go out of their way to avoid showing Sarah’s face. We are told no one knows what she looked like, a newspaper just shows a noose in place of her picture. When we see a bit of her ghost at first, we don’t see a face or anything. At one point we see a music box with her initials on the bottom, S.B. Later as the group are trying to find out info on Sarah, they track down the daughter of the old housekeeper who was supposed to be involved in black magic, named Louise Baptiste. We see that she was close to Sarah and felt bad for her. She also has the exact same music box that Sarah did. On the bottom of hers are the initials L.B. I swore since we had that whole thing with the music box, and they never having any images of Sarah, keeping her a mystery, that Sarah was going to be related to Louise somehow. It might have been just a red herring, but honestly it would have been so much better. It is a shame that they couldn’t just do something like that, but instead they went nowhere with it.

   As previously stated, I didn’t hate Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Maybe if I was knowledgeable on the books, I would have been more excited. Ultimately though, I was left feeling a bit disappointed. The acting was good and there were moments that could genuinely be unsettling. Unfortunately, due to a not so great screenplay, jump scares you can see coming a mile away,  cliché characters, and the movie seemingly not knowing what sort of audience it wants to target, this movie just falls in line with a bunch of other PG-13 horror movies that could’ve been more. Hopefully if a sequel does come, it will boost the scares and improve some of the other weak points. Otherwise this series could just become a forgettable story to find in the dark corner of your local DVD bargain bin.