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![]() ![]() By ditching the short story concept and stringing a bunch of ideas together within a hastily constructed plot line that’s too convoluted for an entire season of a television series, Short Stories to Tell in the Dark ultimately leaves one wanting less. They kept you up at night based on how good they were. The joy of Schwartz’s macabre, exquisitely detailed short stories is that they were so visceral and unnerving – aided immensely by Stephen Gammell’s evocative, dream-like, and disarmingly artful illustrations – that they left readers wanting more. Faster than one could say, “This worked well enough for Goosebumps and Final Destination, so let’s just do both at the same time,” the stories start coming to life and the monsters within them start picking off anyone who was there that night, one by one. The teens break in, find the room, find the book, and not long after that, Sarah starts producing new stories from beyond the grave. Town legend says that Sarah would lure youngsters to the exterior walls of the mansion and read them spooky stories that she kept in a book written in the blood of children. The decaying property was owned in the late 19th century by the wealthiest family in town, the Bellows, whose daughter Sarah famously went insane and was kept locked away in a secret room. After their revenge is mildly successful, they receive some help and protection from Ramon (Michael Garza), a kindly young drifter passing through town, and together they make their way to a supposedly haunted house. A trio of nerdy friends – shy, horror loving Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), who lives with her emotionally ailing single dad (Dean Norris), the hyperactive Chuck (Austin Zajur), and Augie (Gabriel Rush), who’s sort of the smart one, I guess – decide that they’re going to get back at their biggest bully, Tommy (Austin Abrams), a douchey and perpetually sweaty Varsity footballer who can’t wait till he’s eighteen so he can leave town and legally kill people in the Vietnam War. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is set in 1968, during the week-or-so between Halloween and Election Day, in the small town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania. It looks like a film that has had a lot of time and money poured into its construction, but it’s as shallow as an empty kiddie pool at the end of a summer drought. It’s reliably directed, lovingly designed, and reasonably well performed by its young cast, but it’s also relentlessly boring and plodding when it should be a non-stop thrill ride full of ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and creepy-crawlies. ![]() A tonally jarring mishmash of ideas that refuses to let the frequently banned stories of Alvin Schwartz speak for themselves, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark never makes up its mind on what kind of pre-teen horror movie it’s trying to be or what it’s even trying to set up. Visually astounding, but narratively sloppy and tiresome, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in no way improves upon its creepy source material.
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