Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Film Review)

2019 Lionsgate
Directed by: André Øvredal; Written: Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman
Starring: Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, Austin Abrams, Dean Norris, and Gil Bellows
Running Time: 108 Minutes; MPAA Rating: PG-13
The Nicsperiment Score: 8/10

Like most Gen X and Millennial children, I greatly enjoyed Alvin Schwartz' Stephen Gammell-illustrated Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Even better, I've enjoyed reading them to my nine-year-old son over the past year. As fate would have it, in the Year of Our Lord, 2019, a cinematic adaptation of the venerable Scary Stories... anthology has arrived...in non-anthology form.
It's Halloween of 1968, and teenage outcasts Stella, Auggie, and Chuck are ready to get some revenge on tormenting, letter-jacket-wearing bullies. The prank goes array, the kids take off running, make a new friend named Ramon, and hide out from the enraged bullies in their small town's isolated haunted house. Apparently, a wealthy family once lived there, and kept their black sheep daughter in the basement. Town kids would stop by and hear scary stories from the daughter through the walls...and after the town kids heard the stories, they would always end up dead. At first, the outcasts are enjoying freaking each other out...until Stella finds and impulsively takes a book of scary stories written in blood...with the black sheep daughter's initials on it. Before you know it, the blank pages in the book are being filled in with new stories, featuring town kids' names...and the stories, always ending in the death of the protagonists, are coming true.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is well-directed by Norwegian, André Øvredal. The moody, autumnal atmosphere is pitch perfect, and Øvredal uses time period detail to maximum effect. There's not just the aesthetics of decor, fashion, or Night of the Living Dead playing at the drive-in, but the looming backdrop of the 1968 Presidential election and the Vietnam War draft, both of which factor surprisingly into the film's themes and dialogue. The film also does a great job of incorporating some of the most memorable stories from the book into the film, and takes some visual inspiration from Gammell's gory illustrations, though obviously following his aesthetic completely would have pushed the film far out of the PG-13 rating it's already pushing with its violence here. There's some great care taken to foreshadow each character's death, though, even to the point of incorporating deeper psychological elements into the way their character traits determines their methods of dispatchment.
The movie lives and dies on its balancing act of tone, however. This is clearly a film that both wants to be scary, and doesn't want to completely alienate the upper-grade school and middle school readership of its source material. While not every moment lands, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark features some genuinely frightening moments. This is mainly due to the successful blend of Schwartz' work with the ghost story framing device of the film. While the film's adaptations of the stories are hit ("Harold," "The Big Toe") and miss (I didn't care for the CGI representation of the monster for ""Me Tie Dough-ty Walker"), the framing ghost story, featuring the dysfunctional family that lived in said haunted house, always works. However, due to the humor and chemistry between the young leads, the film, while decidedly dark, never ventures into territory irresponsible for children--in fact, its major themes of personal responsibility are quite welcome in this 2019 me only landscape. Not bad for a movie whose (excellent and immersive) musical score (by Marco Beltrami) is centered around an old folk diddy called the "Hearse Song."