‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ review: Guillermo Del Toro delivers early Halloween fest

If one were to talk of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in Indian terms then, instead of bhaya (fear), it evokes quite another rasa veebhatsa or that of revulsion; here, the macabre disgusts. Instead of becoming the stuff of your worst and most abiding nightmares, the scary movie makes you momentarily recoil at the gruesome and the hideous. It doesn’t quite manage to mess with your head and heart enough to haunt you long after it’s over.

An adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s popular tales, Andre Ovredal’s Scary Stories… feels like a mix of the The Twilight Zone and Urban Legend. But a bland one, despite some good acting and atmospherics. It is set in 1968, during the “season of the witch”, in the American small town of Mill Valley. These are the times of the unfolding horrors of the Vietnam War, of the cult horror film Night of the Living Dead, of Nixon on the eve of the presidential elections, and also of openly racist bullying. However, beyond the incipient uneasiness, uncertainty and a sense of the sinister, there is a bigger evil looming large, at a specific address: the haunted house of the Bellows, the site of a tortured childhood. A group of youngsters visit it for a short while and returns home with a book of stories belonging to its now dead resident — young Sarah — only to find it transcending time with newer, malevolent ones getting written on its blank pages with blood. “You don’t read the book, the book reads you”, they get warned.

Scary Stories… ticks a bunch of requisite boxes when it comes to what is needed in a typical horror film. There is a restless spirit, bent on settling scores for the wrongs done unto her. There are a handful of cool monsters: Harold the Scarecrow; the Jangly Man (the dismembered one who drops down the chimney and reassembles his body parts into a disgusting whole) and of course, the pale, smiling lady who embraces only to consume you. Then there is the gruesome Toe monster found in the bowl of stew and a disgusting, uncontrollable zit, the red spot which has the spiders run amok. It’s these grisly beings that make the film come alive, and get the viewers hooked.

In fact, the monsters could have had more meaning than meets the eye. When it comes to Guillermo de Toro (one of the producers and screenplay writers of the film), monsters have often been mirror images of the marginalised, and hence, a conduit for persuasive social commentary. They don’t quite plumb the philosophical depths here. However, the journey through horror does make the young protagonists confront their worst of fears.

Stories hurt, they heal and often they turn real to make people face up to who they are. It makes Ramon (Michael Garza) find direction in life and has Stella (the excellent Zoe Colletti) realise that she isn’t quite responsible for the guilt she had been needlessly harbouring for long. It also makes her take responsibility of telling the real story of another girl who has been wronged all along. Scary Stories... ends up being a film that comes a wholesome full circle, even while dealing with spooky uncertainties.