![]() ![]() Sarah’s book is discovered by Stella when the kids investigate the abandoned mansion on Halloween, joined by Chuck’s sister, Ruth. The new story material goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a cruelly treated woman, Sarah Bellows, who was locked up in the family mansion and spent her time spinning all sorts of horror stories. The TVs everywhere in “Scary Stories” flood us with images of the war in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon on the eve of his presidential election. The haunting begins when horror buff Stella (Zoe Colletti) and her friends, joker Chuck (Austin Zajur), pedant Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and dreamy newcomer Ramón (Michael Garza), find themselves in. Ramon’s story is that he’s “following the harvest” and going where the work takes him. Stella and her pals Chuck and Augie get to know Ramon, new in town and instantly targeted as Not Their Kind by police and civilians alike. The protagonist is Stella, an emotionally isolated high school student living with her father, coping with the breakup of her parents’ marriage. ![]() Colletti is terrific, as are Zajur, Rush, Garza, and Natalie. The pale lady aside, the best thing about the film is its cast. Director Andre Ovredal (“Trollhunter,” “The Autopsy of Jane Doe”) and screenwriters Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman cleverly stitch here and amalgamate there, working from the story cooked up by producer Guillermo del Toro along with Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. The iconic anthology series of horror tales thats now a feature film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a timeless collection of chillingly scary tales and legends, in which folklorist Alvin Schwartz offers up some of the most alarming tales of horror, dark revenge, and supernatural events of all time. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark isn’t as scary as the books. “Scary Stories” recalls the recent, massively popular Stephen King adaptation “It” (2017) in its attempt to provide a narrative spine, a creepy backstory, an awful small-town secret and a reason for all the disappearances and unsolved murders in the Pennsylvania town of Mill Valley. How to give ’em enough story in between the stories to make the thing hang together? Since there’s no connective tissue in the original collections and the film is not a series of separate, “Twilight Zone”-model episodes, the project faced a daunting adaptation challenge. Top cast Zoe Margaret Colletti Stella Nicholls Michael Garza Ramon Morales Gabriel Rush Auggie Hilderbrandt Austin Abrams Tommy Milner Dean Norris. The first volume was published in 1981, followed by two sequels. It comes from a half-dozen short, sharp tales of woe - and “whoa!” - created by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated, with fabulous, sinister panache, by Stephen Gammell. The movie’s good even when it goes in too many directions at once, because it gets the kids right. It has a way of treating even the gross-out bits, involving scarecrow transformation nastiness and the aftermath of a Cinerama Dome-sized spider bite, for real emotion and no little anguish. “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” actually makes you care about the fates of its characters, likable or venal. ![]()
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