Review of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) by Juliiouse — 26 Aug 2019

At a time when the entertainment industry is being saturated with historical coming of age horror mystery stories, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark does so much that other films and TV series do, but much worse. Much like IT and Stranger Things, Scary Stories' main protagonists are a group of children/teenagers who are facing up to a mysterious horror which is plagueing their town, and along the way learn some important lessons about leaving the innocence of childhood behind. The only difference is that none of the characters are really interesting enough (or get much screentime) for the plot to work. Additionally, the town and the people who live in it are never really developed enough to make the threat it faces feel impactful. More time is spent on the monster than on the people who actually matter. The characters are eye-rollingly horror aficionados and "geeks": as this is the 1960's rather than the standard 80's setting, their interests are in B-movies rather than Dungeons & Dragons, but it's too similar to Stranger Things and honestly a little irritating at this point. The only interesting member of the main crew is Ramon: a wandering Latino vagrant who deals with the usual bullying Jocks with a cold, menacing demeanour which makes him feel like he's going to be a good balance to the more immature, geeky characters. Unfortunately, he very quickly outs himself as a massive horror fan and lover of geek culture.

Regarding the monster, the film ultimately fails where other similar films have: it is a horror film that isn't ever that scary. There are a few jump scares here and there, very few of which are paced in a way to feel earned. Much worse than this, there is almost no horror caused by suspense, which fundamentally undermines the main premise of the film: that peoples' gruesome fates are predetermined by a collection of scary stories written in blood. Where there should be a sense of creeping dread, we instead get treated to a collection of monsters being weird things on camera before killing people in as PG-13 a way as possible. I've recently being reading IT, which pulls no punches on the deaths of characters at the hands of monsters, and narrates it in gruesome detail. Much like the recent film version of IT, Scary Stories relishes too much in having monsters mess around on the camera and spends very little time actually making them threatening.

Worst of all, the film ends with a sequel hook, which is especially bad as the overall mystery the film presents is never that interesting, so to stretch it over a minimum of two films is way too much.

If you liked Stranger Things or the 2017 IT, I'm sure you'll enjoy this: but if you want horror, you're watching the wrong film.