Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

I sort of judge horror films on a tier basis. You know the extremities of the film according to the genre in regards to how far they often go. It sort of started when I was a youth watching Hellraiser (1987) for the first time and then in my 20s when I got the chance to see Argento’s body of work, then Cannibal Holocaust really set me off down the rabbit hole of intense gore and ghoulishness. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), just released this last weekend (I just don’t understand why this perfect Halloween seasonal film is dumped in August during the dog days of summer), rides that line between the first and second tiers, the first occupied by the Goosebumps & Stay Alive (2006) of the genre while Final Destination and its ilk sort of slide into the second /third tier due to the creative violence and graphic nature of the kills involved. Goosebumps, I thought before its official release, I was sure would be similar to Scary Stories…sort of sliding Stine stories into a type of wraparound story arc, but that would not be. What Scary Stories…does is get inventive with its device to weave several stories of Schwartz (I own two of these, somewhere stored away in one of my sheds, actually bought at a book fair at my school when I was a kid!) into a narrative of a crew of high school kids (and one draft dodging 18 year old on the lam) targeted by the nightmarish blood-penning of the ghost of a tormented soul, a sort of myth bogeywoman  considered responsible for the poisonings and disappearances of folks in her town.

The main lead is Zoe Colletti, a bookish horror junkie (she will obviously appeal to the horror fans like myself who were just as devoted and obsessed with the genre as her) with an absent mom and depressed workaholic father (Dean Norris of “Breaking Bad” fame) who writes scary stories, compiling them but rarely allowing them to be read by anyone except her friends often encouraging her to publish them some place. Zoe’s Stella almost doesn’t go out with her friends, jokey Chuck (Austin Zajur) and arty, friend-zone doomed Auggie (Gabriel Rush), two of the unfortunate geeks in school, often in the crosshairs of bullying dicks, Tommy (Austin Abrams) and his droogs in letterman jackets. When Chuck is successful in losing a sack of his own shit by one of Tommy’s goons in his sports car, believed to be Halloween candy, they also retaliate by egging the vehicle’s windows, with a lit rag the final toss…this nearly sets Tommy on fire. It is a primal scream from those bullied at the assholes always victimizing them at school, but Tommy soon follows after them, as Chuck’s sister, Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn), is unfortunately caught in the middle…she decides, for some reason I can’t quite grasp, to date Tommy despite every kind of red light and bullhorn going off as indicators he would be nothing more than a hellhound with overbite. The drive-in, playing Night of the Living Dead (much like many other horror franchises these days, Scary Stories… is set in 1968), is where Stella, Chuck, and Auggie find themselves fleeing inside as Tommy and his goons search for them, finding the car of on-the-run Ramón (Michael Garza, handsome and cherubic), retreating into it. Ramón is smitten with Stella (she does this little nudge of her glasses as they often slide a little from her eyes, down a bit of her face), and she clearly likes him as well…it is certainly not lost on us that they are lonelyhearts looking for companionship. Good chemistry with all the leads is quite an asset in any horror film and I think this is a lifeblood for Scary Stories…, sort of following in the footsteps of the recent box office hit, It: Chapter One. The retro horror film is just all the rage these days, and it does seem can’t-miss when focusing on youth trying to avoid a certain kind of malevolence that is almost impossible to avoid. While Goosebumps II (2018) was an easy bit of kiddie horror my teens found palatable if forgettable last October, Scary Stories… had them on the edge of their seats, often with heads in hands, between their legs, a nailbiter that I found unexpectedly fun.

The stories involved, “penned” by the ghost of Sarah Bellows in a book located by Stella in the deteriorated relic considered the local haunted house fit to be condemned, demolished, and ready for something less gloomy and more community oriented. Found in a basement “prison chamber”, the book features stories containing names of her own family, members of the Bellows never seen again, later determined to have suffered whatever fates were determined by the author. Soon, Stella’s friends are victims of stories in the book, starting with Tommy, who locks Stella, Chuck, Auggie, Ramón, even his date for the evening, June, in the basement. Eventually Stella and the gang are released by Sarah once her book is removed from its lengthy resting place, opened so it can once again add stories to its pages. Tommy, always taking a bat among other weapons, to a scarecrow set in his father’s cornfield, hates Harold (name of the scarecrow). Tommy eventually is ordered by mom to carry some eggs to a neighbor’s house, and the dick decides to march through the cornfield, unknowingly in the midst of a stalk-and-pursuit he can’t anticipate. Harold, with the wood attached to him snapping and scraping across the dirt ground, doesn’t speed towards Tommy but it gains ground due to him being drunk and clumsy. You really have to suspend disbelief with this film. The stories are really outré and often quite gruesome, the macabre, unsettling nature of them not lost on me when I was a kid. They could be so outrageous and defy logic, but I can recall nights where they left a distinct impression as I stared up at the ceiling in the night. Tommy’s fate is something quite ghoulish, and my family (the kids were taken aback) reacted as I imagine was intended…choking on straw that seems to be growing inside him after Harold impales him with a pitchfork, eventually Tommy replaces him as the scarecrow, his letterman jacket intact. The roaches and face-skin head on Harold are nicely wretched touches I appreciated.

The RED Room, where Chuck can’t seem to escape the gradually closing-in slovenly, massively obese, haggard, smiley-faced ogre with strandy hair who has been a spectre often in his nightmares just screamed Kubrick to me. She appears in nearly every corridor as the lights in a mental hospital (where Stella and Ramón learn she was committed by her torture/doctor brother, using electric shock and interrogation to try to get her to admit her wrongdoing when, in fact, it was him and his family behind mercury-poisoned water murdering locals, audio found in a rarely-visited records room confirming it) go red due to doctors on site discovering him on the run. Stella, Ramón, and a very reluctant Chuck illegally enter the hospital and try to remain elusive but the latter eventually separates from them, finding himself cut off in a wing that surrounds him with the “pale lady” who is in every room no matter where he turns. His fate is quite a what the fuck moment I thought was just a gobsmacker…she literally absorbs him into her torso.

Not for the squeamish is poor June with a spider bite on her cheek worsening, a victim of Sarah’s story, The Red Spot. This is cleverly shot in a way not to move the needle from PG-13 to an R-rating. Her face was opened up after the bite grew into quite a sore, a leg protruding from a hole that eventually spills out a litany of creepy-crawlies certain to provoke quite a bit of nausea, shock, and disgust. The CGI spiders might or might not work. I think the sequence was shot effectively enough to avoid too much disappointment. But this is not for those who find a busting open sore on the face spilling out spiders that fill the stall of a restroom in school too much to stomach.

Auggie doesn’t believe in the book, just not willing to accept that Sarah Bellows was responsible for the disappearance of Tommy. His mom and stepdad are away and Auggie is at home, finding a big pot of stew in the refrigerator. The stew wasn’t cooked by mom and yet Auggie spoons some of the goulash, eventually taking a mouth full of severed toe! Soon a walking rotting corpse comes looking for the toe and Stella, through walkie-talkie contact (a lot of my childhood horror often had kids talking to each other through walkie-talkies and the like), can’t save Auggie from her clutches. This is a bit less impactful but still not too shabby as it involves the good use of silence and then jump scare music jolting once the corpse’s shrieking face startles Auggie (and many a viewer) while he hides under the bed, dragged into nothingness while fingernailing his wood floor. There is a lot of silence before the jolt in this film. I liked that a lot. Yes, jump scare reliance and the use of music to startle the viewer are horror movie tricks we all know so well, but I don’t think they have to be abandoned if applied properly. They sure seemed to work for my kids.

But the showstopper is what I read was called The Jangly Man. Ramón’s bogeyman, a campfire ghoul that never left him after his story was told, has a bizarre introductory phrase emitted from its hideous visage, “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker”. In a growl, spit from his decomposed face, he pursues Ramón, with twisting body and crackling bones, with the ability to assemble loose body parts (in his introduction, The Jangly Man’s arms, legs, and eyeball-opening head emerge from a fireplace in a police station, surprising a stunned Gil Bellows, a racist cop who gives Ramón a hard time, eventually snapping his neck with one quick turn) when need-be. This monster just freaked out my kids. It is relentless, always after Ramón, following him from an escape cell (Bellows places Ramón and Stella in separate cells for illegal entry into the mental hospital and their supposed cockamamie story about Sarah and her book) to a taken cop car to the infamous Bellows manor. While Ramón hopes to find a way to deter The Jangly Man, Stella finds herself “lost” in time, seemingly substituting for Sarah, in her place, pursued by her family, eventually found under a table, losing her glasses (found covered in dust by Ramón), and drug by her hair, kicking and screaming, to the basement locked chamber. I really dug how the film juxtaposes what is happening in present day 1968 to Ramón and many decades earlier to Stella when the Bellows manor was in its original form before it would be abandoned and left to fall to ruin. And the faint signs of both can be heard to let the remaining duo know that perhaps their stories can be altered if Stella can just reach Sarah somehow, hoping to convince her to rethink her reign of terror.

The evocation of 1968, the old posters on Stella’s walls, her Halloween disguise as a witch, the old haunted house, the kids trying to avoid the darkness of a cursed book that writes itself, a number of ghouls certainly developed by a mind turned mad due to circumstances beyond her control, and stylish touches that reach back into the 70s and further certainly pulled me in as a horror fan. The director, André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe), draws his inspiration from the old masters, and the results are a Halloween smorgasbord, perhaps leaving a seasonal classic that will be embraced by October enthusiasts for years to come. The young cast, especially Zoe and Garza, anchor the film surprisingly well. This might be a sleeper of late summer. 3.5/5