The shadow of the Bellows family has loomed large in the small town of Mill Valley for generations. It's in a mansion that young Sarah Bellows turns her tortured life and horrible secrets into a series of scary stories. These terrifying tales soon have a way of becoming all too real for a group of unsuspecting teens who stumble upon Sarah's spooky home.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a fun little horror flick; something that could be compared to a more mature Goosebumps movie. While there was a lot of anticipation around this film that Guillermo del Toro was involved with, since its New Zealand release two weeks ago, there has been little adulation to be seen. One could surmise that while Guillermo del Toro is a masterful director when it comes to creature design, in this film, however, the director's hat goes to André Øvredal (he also directed Troll Hunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe), with del Toro taking on the lesser role of producer and screenplay writer.
In reality, it is this tone of a Goosebumps movie for more maturer audiences that holds Scary Stories back from being something brilliant. The framework for the plot--the premise that binds together this series of unfortunate events--is weak and basic, which would make it appeal more to children. The monsters and creepy events that occur, on the other hand, are surprisingly dark, and would likely scare children too much. Being that this movie is based on the book series (of the same name), it appears that the target audience would be adults horror-lovers that were brought up on the books and want to introduce their children to more adult horror films. It, therefore, has a rather slim demographic to appeal to.
The creature designs are rather off-putting (in both a good and bad way). While I have not read the source material, a quick image search shows that the creature designs in the film were by-and-large faithful to the books; some of the creatures are pure nightmare fuel. That being said, the majority of the monsters don't really do much and spend far too much time in full view, which reduces the impact of the scares, relying on unnecessary jump scares. It's interesting to note that the creatures are largely done with practical effects. The effects used in post-production make them look over-glossed and of CGI origin, which is a complete waste of practical effects.
The main group of protagonists did have some reasonable depth to their characters, with sufficient backstory and personality traits that worked convincingly to connect them with the stories being told.
There is a very Final Destination vibe to the story, with characters aware of a likely unavoidable death in their immediate future. Whereas Final Destination has the intrigue of trying to figure out the order of the deaths and the cause, Scary Stories is much simpler, literally providing the answers to the protagonists in a book. This does, on the flip side, utilise the ticking timer method of tension very well. If you are paying attention to the dialogue, you will notice that many of the setups are very obvious, and even red herrings stand out, which allow you to predict the direction of the narrative long before the reveal.
The colour-grading also felt unimpressive. Granted this could be an issue of the settings on the projector rather than the colour scheme of the film, but there were no true blacks in the film. All of the blacks and shadows were blue-grey, which reduced the contrast and visibility creating visual fuzz during any night time scenes.
There are some nice scenes within Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark which will appeal to those that have read the source material. For those that haven't, there is little substance that will stick in the mind. The horror and gore are very much repressed and its limited moments in the film fail to maintain intrigue throughout the runtime.