Upping their resumes in both the horror and YA genre, director André Øvredal and screenwriters Dan and Kevin Hageman get a suffusion of Guillermo Del Toro’s signature aestheticism in the masterful adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Produced by Del Toro, the somehow vibrant look of an abysmal Pennsylvanian milieu is imbued with the same lifeblood as other iconic film towns (some real, some fictitious) of childhood ennui suddenly crossed with more adventure than bargained for–think: Astoria, Oregon in The Goonies, Shelby, Indiana in Now and Then or Hill Valley in Back to the Future. In fact, it’s Mill Valley where we set our scene(s) of horror in a film that, at long last, will force young audiences out of the sanitized coma Hollywood has been putting them in for years with the likes of such schlock as The Secret Life of Pets. Now, once again, the youth can be transported back to having a similar childhood experience to the baby boomers of the 70s, faced (as Bret Easton Ellis so loves to talk about in White) with real and unmitigated horror without the censure of their progenitors, still accustomed to major studios pandering to the coddling sensibilities of twenty-first century parenting and perhaps assuming the same will go for this “for kids” movie.
But just as was the case with Alvin Schwartz’s original three books comprising the overall narrative, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (released in 1981), More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (released in 1984) and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones (released in 1991), this movie makes no bones (which, yes, seems like an antithetical idiom for this particular bone-chilling nightmare) about wielding the fear factor. In point of fact, it is by forcing its main characters, Stella Nicholls (Zoe Colletti), Chuck Steinberg (Austin Zajur), Auggie Hiderbrandt (Gabriel Rush), Ramón Morales (Michael Garza) and Ruth Steinberg (Natalie Ganzhorn) to get in touch with their worst ones that each individual is able to come to terms with something about themselves they previously couldn’t address (even if some of them don’t quite make it out of that revelation “alive”).
It all starts, naturally, on Halloween, in 1968, against the backdrop of the election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, for a certain added flair to the overall scariness of that particular tumultuous year. Especially for Stella and her two best friends, Chuck and Auggie, who seem to be realizing that this is the last–absolute last–socially acceptable Halloween for them to get away with a little “trick or treat”-inspired ruse spurred on by the two-dimensional jock bully that is Tommy Milner (Austin Abrams, not to be confused with Austin Butler). Tommy’s inexplicable thirst for being an asshole is further stoked when the trio takes it upon themselves to throw a flaming bag of shit into his car as he’s driving. Though this is unfortunate for his two minions in the backseat, it’s most unfortunate of all for Ruth, who is suddenly seeing that she seems to be the only one capable of Mattel’s standard of beauty and Emily Post’s standard of kindness.
Ditched by her date so that he can go in pursuit of the shit-flingers that stink bombed him, Ruth being constantly discarded and underlooked will become relevant to what eventually happens to her in her own tailor-made scary story. In the meantime, in the trio’s attempt to hide from Tommy and his lackeys, they encounter Ramón at the drive-in where Night of the Living Dead is playing. As an already natural “drifter” and “outsider,” Ramón’s skin tone doesn’t end up helping Stella and her crew in keeping a low profile. The constant discrimination against Ramón throughout the film feels like a pointed statement on Del Toro’s part, known to hit all the right political notes of what it feels like to be the “other” in the United States. This sense of the dangers of “otherness,” too, was omnipresent in The Shape of Water.
The source of all this chaos suddenly wrought in the lives of these teens is thus, accordingly, manufactured by an outsider herself. Or rather, the ghost of one named Sarah Bellows. Despite being born into the affluent Bellows family, responsible for putting the town on the map with their mill, Sarah’s harsh and severe treatment by her own brethren leads her to retreat into the stories she writes while locked away in the dark bowels of the basement–the black maid’s daughter, Lulu (Lorraine Toussaint), being the only one that takes pity upon her egregious sequestering (because she’s albino a.k.a. too unsightly for a rich family to parade) long enough to give her the blank pages to write upon for solace. But her solace is everyone else’s torture as the stories (rumored to be written in the blood of the children she makes disappear) spring to life from the page. Largely, in book form, thanks to the chilling illustrations (namely The Pale Lady) from Stephen Gammell’s original work in the novels, which translate effortlessly to screen. Undoubtedly, a careful and meticulous amount of consideration for the source material is at play. What’s more, Del Toro not only produced, but also etched out the skeleton of the story (another fitting metaphor), ergo it has his stamp all over it. Even in his careful selection of the music, appropriately enlisting resident witchy woman of the U.S. Lana Del Rey to (long overduely) cover Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” (the original version playing during the introductory scenes). It is the lyrics of this song that lend a playful sense of foreboding to the perfectly paced initial scenes that set up the fateful night of our scrappy protagonists, blending equal parts Jumanji and Hocus Pocus to create a twenty-first century offering of a worthwhile caliber in this once pervasive “YA ‘horror'” genre. What’s more, at the very least, the power of the written word is being given some reinvigorated import again, even if all this might do is serve to inspire another generation of writers as opposed to readers (for even Chuck gives the dig at Stella, “This is why I don’t read,” in reference to the book cursing them all). Because to be a writer is to play god and to be a reader is to play servile submissive to the whims of said god.
Bibliophile or not, as the grandiosity of the effects escalates with each new story rendered to the page in real time, it brings up the truism, “If we repeat stories often enough, they become real. They make us who we are.” For Sarah, it is she herself who has been repeating the same stories for so long, a reflection of her inner rage turned outward, that results in Stella ultimately confronting her about her destructive behavior. In so doing, she seems to be speaking to the psych 101 element behind so many abusers in telling her, “You were a victim. But now you’ve turned into a monster.” For yes, so often, this is the only means by which someone who was abused can feel they’ve turned their injustice around (though one has absolutely no idea what the fuck happened to Harvey Weinstein to make him so gross).
But, in the best possible way, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark abuses its audience by bringing back the much needed trend of scaring the shit out of youth audiences so that perhaps they don’t turn out to be such pussies…even if it happened to millennials anyway. Then again, Are You Afraid of the Dark? rather pales in comparison to these stories first and foremost bequeathed upon Gen Xers.
