Is Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Actually Scary?
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, those freaky old books with the terrifying monochrome illustrations you probably read as a kid, has gotten the big-budget movie adaptation. To get right down to it: Is it good? No. As a movie, it's fundamentally a mess that neither works as a standalone film nor as an anthology of the several adapted titular scary stories. It's a project that wants to have its cake and eat it too, weaving together a coming-of-age story about some misfit teens in the vein of IT or Stranger Things with some short-form horror to break things up. Neither succeeds and then at the end of it all the film has the gall to set up an entire franchise? No more of these, thanks so much.
But ultimately, how scary is it? Where does Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark lie on the spectrum of appeal from genre fanatics to people who think every movie should be Finding Nemo, preferably minus the shark bits? We've already established that "scary" is a loose term, so let's break it down:
Give it to me straight: Am I going to jump out of my seat and look like an idiot?
Probably. There are a good half-dozen jump scares, the most effective coming during the film's foray into one of the more classic original stories, "The Big Toe." But this isn't one of those film's that tries to "get" you every fifteen seconds.
Will it keep me up at night?
Not really. There are some horrible "what if?" moments. Like, what if a zit turned out to be a spider bite and a bunch of spiders came spilling out of your face? But that's on the front page of Reddit, like, every day.
I hate blood!
You'll be fine. This movie is PG-13, which means it's partly designed for high schoolers to make out during it, alongside being restricted in the kind of violence it can show. There's some pretty intense body horror even without the blood, though. A particular sequence with a scarecrow has a pretty disgusting physical transformation, and then there's that spider-face thing I talked about.
Is it a graveyard smash?
It's a disappointment, really, but at least the creature design is great. This is a movie that Guillermo del Toro produced, and that dude loves nothing more than a well-made creeper. The scarecrow is horrifying, the amorphous monster that stalks one of the kids in a hospital is haunting in its slow-moving calmness, and even the howling CGI creation that functions as the film's "final boss" is impressive.
Get over yourself and rate the film on a scale of 1-5 for scariness, already.
Two pre-recorded haunted house shrieks out of five.
Originally Appeared on GQ
