Like I mentioned in my review of the documentary about the "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books that I watched earlier this month, I've always loved these books. I grew up reading them, and my little horror-loving heart read the stories of horror and blood over and over again. Funtimes. I was excited to hear that they were making a movie based on the stories in these books, so I put it right on my "must watch" list for this year. I finally get to check it out today.
Guillermo Del Toro cowrote the screenplay for this movie, so it's got plenty of childhood angst and corruption of innocence, like all his movies do. The main story of the movie concerns a family that lived in a creepy house in a small town and fiercely guarded their family secret: a daughter that was never allowed to leave the house because there was something...off about her. Local children would come to the house and claim if they listened at the walls they could hear the daughter, Sarah, telling them stories, but the children who heard these stories all eventually died, having been poisoned, and legend says that Sarah poisoned them. So this Halloween, some kids are exploring the house, scaring each other with this legend, and they find Sarah's old room in the house, and they discover an old book filled with Sarah's Scary stories. A bully locks them in Sarah's room as a prank, and they decide to ask Sarah to tell them her stories (bad idea, kids). One of them takes Sarah's book of stories home with her, and when she reads them, the stories start to come true.
The movie is set in 1968, and it's got an authentic, old-timey feel to it, which I appreciated. The stories were familiar to me from reading the books, but I liked the new spin on the stories, as they start to actually happen to the kids who found the book. I gotta say, the movie manages to be pretty effective. I never want to eat stew ever again now. Bleh. And I already hated spiders, so that whole sequence was freaky as hell. There's even a woman with long dark hair in this movie who is made to look like one of the more infamous creepy illustrations from the books, and she definitely made me cringe. I can't imagine having to watch this movie in a dark theater. It's scary enough in my well-lit bedroom.
There's a lot of depth written into the script, with racism and the Vietnam War causing problems among the characters. I also like how some of the stories are woven into the plot of the movie even if they aren't acted out like making the "found a dog that turned out to be a rat" legend be a story written by one of the girls who found the book, and the "did you ever think as a hearse goes by that you might be the next to die" song is played by a music box owned by an older lady who knew Sarah when she was a child.
As the movie goes on, we learn more about what Sarah's life was really like and how she might not have been as evil as the stories say. As the old lady put it when explaining where Sarah got her power from: "Stories hurt. Stories heal." Maybe writing the stories helped Sarah, but over the years the horrible things done to her created an evil presence that has a life of its own, and it can kill anyone it touches even now, years later. The stories from these books are all based off old legends or urban legends, so they have this feeling of being a part of our history, and seeing them come to life in this movie was totally like having some of my oldest nightmares come to life. I thought it was great, but definitely unsettling. This is one of the best movies I've watched yet this year.
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