Better late than never: AKA, movies that came out 2+ years ago that I meant to see and never got around to watching until recently! This Saturday I watched Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark!
I do want to preface my thoughts with the acknowledgment that, like so many of my peers, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series of books was the first exposure I had to children’s horror. (Not horror in general – alas, my parents let me consume Stephen King, Tales from the Crypt, and the first DOOM game as a 4 year old… which explains a thing or two, I guess!) There’s a LOT of nostalgia and yearning tied up with these books, especially with the art by Stephen Gammell. I must confess to one of the many misunderstandings that led me to where I am now: for like the first 20 years of my life I didn’t really… realize that the writer and the artist for the Scary Stories books were two different people. I just assumed that everything was done by the same person until I was like… in community college. Which explains why I decided to, and then did, write a collection of short stories accompanied by art, I suppose!
The book itself was so influential on me, on how I thought about folklore and horror as a kid, that I really avoided the movie for a while because I was worried about whether it would or even could live up to my expectations. When I read those books at seven, eight, nine: I could FEEL the Black Dog looking at me. I could HEAR the spider crawling on my face. I dreamed of rooms with checkerboard floors and empty houses with faces in the windows. I started telling those stories to my not-quite-old-enough-to-read little brothers, and embellishing them, and then eventually making up my own stories. It’s a lot to put on a single piece of media: not just that it would define a feeling for people the way the book did for me, but that it would make storytellers and wordslingers and horrorcrafters of them the way it did for me. I was afraid that I would be disappointed, even though I loved the source material and the director and everything I’d seen of the trailers.
The movie is rated PG-13, and in a way that says everything: it would have frightened me and haunted me and fascinated me as a teenager, it would have scared the bejesus out of me as a child. It’s a movie about teens at the end of their time in high school, the prime setting to deliver anxious mystery to middle-schoolers about what the future might be like, with characters who are still within reach. As an adult with a middle-school tween, I found myself experiencing the movie not as a child who could feel the characters’ fear but as a parent. (And wow, Dean Norris, good job? You really got me, dude.)
The movie’s 1968 setting makes it clear from scene one that there’s a social anxiety simmering constantly around the horror of the ghosts and whatnot. Boys in their varsity jackets sign up for the war in Vietnam, bouncing off one another in the street. Richard Nixon is elected president. A teenager, reeling from his brother’s death in Vietnam at the beginning of the summer, is racing through small-town Pennsylvania to escape his own draft notice. The police leer at and suspect the only Latin character in the entire movie; Our Good Football Boys call him slurs left and right; our Earnest Actually-Good Boys allow soft-racist baubles like pearls of shit tumble from their lips as they try to impress him and fawn over his beautiful face and cool demeanor and instant attraction to their Troubled Girl Pal. (As a Latin person who has spent a couple dozen summer and spring breaks in small-town Pennsylvania over the last 35 years, yeah, that tracks.)
Some parts of the movie are scarier or more horrible than the book. Movie “Harold,” which scared me way too much for a city kid who to this day has never seen a real scarecrow, affords its victim both a cleaner death than the book and a more horrifying, spirit-crushing end. “Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker” removes the hypnotic call-and-response of the original story to give us The Just A Horrible Guy Doing Horrible Things, Actually from “What Do You Come For?” (At least the dog’s alright in this version….) The terribly sad woman from “The Dream” trying to warn the dreamer to safety is… kind of the most nightmarish part of this movie, and brings forth a lot of Adult Feelings And Fears.
There’s a hopeful note at the end, even as it is soured by the reality of the draft and the long years in Vietnam ahead. It’s the kind of thing you’d hope a kid of ten or twelve would see and later ask about, and devote long hours to pondering. I’m not sure if it makes the kids who watch it want to be writers, or filmmakers, or storytellers at all, but… it really wasn’t for me? It’s a movie for children, to give them their first horror anthology without all the tits and drugs and buckets of gore. The fact that it’s exactly what the book was made to be is, I think, enough to tuck it gently away, like a beloved old storybook with dogeared pages and bathwater stains on the corner. Everybody starts somewhere in horror. I think it’s a pretty good start for the kids out there who don’t have the baggage of nostalgia to weigh them down.
As a side note, wow, those kids acted their little butts off. Good job, guys.
SHARO CREATES 