Driving home after seeing Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I called my dad.
I asked about his day. He asked about mine. Then, as I drove through the night with a prickly awareness of my vacant backseat and my high beams lighting the road, we spoke of the stories.
In many ways, the nightmarish chronicles of Alvin Schwartz's three-part book series feel inscrutably entangled with my dad, who would read them aloud to my sister and me. Tales of vengeful scarecrows, corpses refusing to rest, and calls coming from inside the house were staple celebrations of our household Halloweens.
"Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die..."
Watching André Øvredal's adaption, I was reminded of the many times I'd heard these stories before.
When an off-screen voice demanded to know "Who took my toe?" I could only hear my dad's raspy rendition of the same line. When Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker appeared, I covered my eyes instinctively, remembering the book's ghastly depiction of his disembodied face.
Woven together by an original story, Stephen Gammell's haunting illustrations and Schwartz's mercilessly bleak horror stories come to life in the cinematic telling. But unlike the nostalgia-laden remakes of It and Pet Sematary, these monsters are far hazier — well known in childhood, but blurred by the passage of time. I, for one, hadn't given them a passing thought in well over a decade.
And yet, like spiders creeping from a Red Spot, these memories infested each moment of my movie watching. Leaving the theater, film critics from various outlets could also be heard recounting where they had first come to know these terrors, with a select few humming bars from the Hearse Song as they headed for the parking lot. (You know, "Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die..." That one.)
"They drew straws to see which one would go back."
Image: cbs films/lionsgate
Audiences' shared fondness for these tales is at once Scary Stories' greatest asset and its biggest obstacle. Recreating six of the series' iconic terrors and half-heartedly referencing a handful more, Øvredal's take is dutifully appreciative of its source material. Many of the stories have been altered to suit the film's central narrative, and the original illustrations transformed into three-dimensional beings — but the gleeful dread remains largely in tact.
Scary Stories transports you back to wherever and however you first became their victim, providing an experience that is at once heartfelt and horrific.
Granted, weaving together these masterfully told tales proves a bit challenging for the film. Scary Stories anchors its story around Stella, a young Nancy Drew/Sylvia Plath hybrid with a fondness for taking books that don't belong to her. Set during the fall of 1968 in a small American town, the aftermath of Stella's cursed thievery slowly but steadily picks off her friends and loved ones, using the original stories as Final Destination-like vessels for their demise.
It's a fine enough structure, but struggles to step aside when it's time for the main show. Constant reminders of the narrative's tagline — "Stories can hurt, stories can heal" — and repeated references to Richard Nixon's presidential campaign muck up the downtime between kills. Stella is a fine enough character, and well acted by 17-year-old Zoe Colletti, but the movie's relentless desire to have her instill new meaning on an already iconic world is tiresome.
"While Ruth slept, a spider crawled on her face. It stopped for some minutes on her left cheek, then it went on its way."
Image: cbs films/lionsgate
With an 108-minute runtime, Scary Stories struggles to get around to making whatever additional point it had, instead using a wealth of in-between scenes to justify its feature-length format. Perhaps it would have been better as a televised anthology, but even then there's an argument to be made that recreating the stories wasn't warranted in any medium. They're practically perfect as is.
That being said, I'm grateful for the adaptation. After reminiscing with my dad and checking my dark apartment for unwelcome strangers, I sought out an online copy of the original stories — an action I would not have taken without the cinematic prompting.
Late into the night, I relived each of the torments and reveled in the regularly forgotten joke sections of each book. After all these years, those Scary Stories are still being told, now on and off screen.
And haunted or not, it feels good to be home.
