Review of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) by Shininglion — 25 Oct 2021

It caught me entirely off guard that this film was as bad as it is, considering the names attached to its production. It's the worst movie I've seen in years. For starters it is visually ugly and horribly shot. There are moments where scenes are too dark, and you'll see four consecutive shots of who knows what because you're lucky to make out a shape or two on screen. Rather than build suspense it's simply disorienting. This film doesn't excite or thrill so much as it just makes you uncomfortable. Most of the movie is shot upwards at the actors faces from about waist height, giving everyone an unflattering odd appearance. Several shots have a bubbled fish-eye look like someone shot them with the selfie mode on their iphone. Conversations are awkwardly shot where when the camera switches between two people, both appear on the same side of the screen, so it looks like they aren't facing each other. From a film-making point of view this film looks like it was made by high schoolers with expensive cameras. Not kidding.

I wish the technical issues were where this film's problems end, but they're not. It's plodding, boring, and all of the "stories" featured in the film aren't even told or explained in the film, so if you aren't well-versed on the books you aren't going to understand anything going on other than "the book makes monsters come out b/c some tortured girl wrote them". Wow how deep.

Worst of all is that this film was a surprise bomb for weird woke propaganda, your daily BS reminder from Hollywood that white people, especially men, are evil. All four characters that die are white males, some we are led to believe deserved it, some just too weak and cowardly to defend themselves. A supposedly Mexican kid gets called a w*tb*ck and has his car vandalized by bullies, gets threats and intimidation from a white cop. There's even a way the film randomly manages to flash back to the dark time in American history when blacks were owned as slaves just so they can show a little black slave girl about to be beat. And don't worry, Asians, there's some victimhood reminders in there for you too, as the film is peppered with completely irrelevant (to the plot) shots of Nixon and the Vietnam war. None of the victimized characters get any real justice in the film, I should add, so it's even more pointless and confusing why they added these social justice elements.

The acting was bad and inconsistent. I knew from the moment I watched a character fish his own turd from a toilet on screen that something was off about this movie, and from there the whole film just became a big flaming turd of weird out of place woke propaganda, with nothing to say about its own story, or its social justice undertones. The film ends in the most cliche way imaginable (someone tells the ghost they'll set the record straight about them and their abusers, tell people the real story, and asks the ghost to stop being a meanie, and the haunting stops). Keep your kids far away from this film and any sequel that might come from it. It was an utter brain fart filled with confusing and damaging messaging. How "woke" that the only character in there that black kids might see as "representation" is a little slave girl about to get flogged. Why push this stuff on kids? The mini-stories within the film are never explained, including the weird phrase that the jangling man says, so it's basically an advertisement for the books that doesn't work as a stand-alone movie. The film's ending has the main girl preach to the ghost that enough is enough when it comes to rage for past abuse and she needs to not become a monster like them. It would almost feel like a jab at violent social justice warriors who use their obsession with past victimhood to assume the worst in everyone and harm others, if the film wasn't so tepid and confusing with its messaging. Rather it comes off as just poor writing with no real meaning. Is this film woke or anti-woke? Who knows. I think it was trying to say something on the topic but just pandered to both sides in the weirdest way and failed miserably to say anything real. The main character is a self-hating dork who blames herself for everything right up through the end of the film. That's apparently what the writers think the audience will relate to. How inspiring.

I give this film 1 star for the jangling man scenes because they did a good job on that monster being pretty freaky. Nothing else in this film was remotely interesting or scary, just gross, boring, and uncomfortable. Save yourself two overdrawn hours of your life and a handful of yawns. This aint the new Halloween classic you're looking for.