10s Movie Review - Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Director: André Øvredal
Genre: Horror
Runtime: 108 minutes
Year: 2019
Starring: Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Abrams, Dean Norris, Gil Bellows, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, Lorraine Toussaint, Kathleen Pollard, Deborah Pollitt, Victoria Fodor, Marie Ward, Mark Steger, Javier Botet, Troy James, Kyle Labine, David Tompa, Karen Glave, Stephanie Belding

Description: On Halloween 1968, reclusive Stella and het two friends meet a mysterious drifter, Ramón, and uncover a sinister notebook of stories.

Review: Some names in Hollywood create high expectations. Like Guillermo del Toro for instance. “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” has a screenplay written by Del Toro, who also produced the film. His name is on the poster. The film is loosely based on the short stories by Alvin Schwartz and directed by the Norwegian André Øvredal. But the film is a bit disappointing.
It's not a direct adaptation of Schwartz’ stories. Instead, some of his stories were bundled into a somewhat coherent narrative about the fears of the teenagers who play the main roles. It’s 1968, in a sleepy American town, where Both Halloween and the Vietnam war are awaiting. Teenager and aspiring writer Stella, her friends Auggie and Chuck and newcomer Ramón are running from a group of bullies and end up in a mysterious, abandoned house.
One day, a girl lived her and she wrote ghost stories in an old book. When Stella finds this book and takes it home, she finds out it is a very special book. There is some sort of a curse on it and the book starts to write stories about Stella and her friends. And whenever they appear in a story, their life isn’t safe.
Many of the almost isolated horror moments are confrontations between the teenager in question and a monster. People are chased, there is some growling and flickering lights, but the variation is hard to find. The only exception is a somewhat older teenager who is confronted with a huge pimple on her cheek before a school performance.
The film had such a promising starting point, but is overall not that special. The film does have some really creepy monsters, but overall it’s a film with a few cheap jump scares. But even for a scaredy-cat like me, this wasn’t the ‘scary story’ that the title promised me. It could have been so much more.

Rating: 2,5 / 5