Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) Review

"You don't read the book, the book reads you."

-Stella Nicholls

On Halloween, a group of teenagers go exploring a haunted house and find an old book of scary stories.  They soon discovers that the book is writing new stories and they are the characters.  As the stories come to life, one by one, the kids begin to disappear.  Will they be able to stop it or will they all become another scary story?

What Works:

I was a huge fan of these books growing up and I read them over and over.  The stories themselves are terrifying, but the horrific illustrations are what really traumatized me.  We only get to see five of the stories come to life, but they are all effective and terrifying.  This movie has problems, but it gets the most important element right.

The most famous story involves a girl getting a weird pimple that turns out to be spider eggs inside of her face.  It's gruesome and tough to watch, especially for a PG-13 movie.  I like spiders and I had a tough time watching.  Anyone with arachnophobia needs to be prepared.

The story that always scared me the most is the one involving the Pale Lady (Mark Steger).  The story itself isn't that scary, but the illustration disturbed me to no end.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!  It's an image that has stuck with me since elementary school and haunts my nightmares.  While this movie changes up the context of the Pale Lady, the character herself is still terrifying.  Her sequence had me on the edge of my seat and made me want to flee from the theater.

Finally, the atmosphere for this movie is great and really got me in the mood for Halloween, even though it's only August.  The Halloween setting is great and the spooky atmosphere is wonderful.

What Sucks:

I do think the overall narrative of the movie is pretty weak.  The stories don't tie together very well at the ultimate plot isn't that interesting.  I almost wonder if this film would have worked better as an anthology.  Trying to tie all of these different stories together may have been too large a task.

One of my least favorite tropes in horror movies is when one character makes a decision that kicks off all of the spooky events, which results in all of their friends getting killed, but they survive.  It drives me up the wall and horror movies need to follow the Evil Dead reboot in killing off that character in horrific fashion.  This movie has that trope and it's extremely irritating.  It's hard to root for a protagonist who makes such dumb decisions.

Finally, the characters are all pretty lackluster.  Most of them are one note or irritating.  Ramón (Michael Garza) is the only one I didn't dislike and his character arc is very unsatisfying.

Verdict:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a fun and spooky movie that nails the scares and the atmosphere, but not the characters and story.  It's a flawed movie, but is worth seeing and has got it going on.

 7/10: Good