Review of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK – Rated PG-13 – 1 hr. 51 mins     

This humble opinion is brought to by you T. K. Edwards

SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK – Rated PG-13 – 1 hr. 51 mins     

Director:  Andre’ Ovredal

Cast:   Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Zajur, Gil Bellows, Dean Norris 

A group of teens visit a haunted house only to find a book that writes horror stories on its own about those that are in contact with it.

NO SPOILERS BELOW

First things first, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK is a very good PG-13 horror movie.  It has all the creepiness and scares that you are expecting a horror movie to have and then some.  The director, Andre Ovredal, has done a great job of piecing together a movie that could have easily been rated R and shown loads of blood, guts & gore, but instead he chose to make it more “Goosebumpy”, so that a younger audience can enjoy a horror movie too, which makes sense because the movie is based on books that are written for a teenage audience.  Everyone that I’ve spoken to that has read the books have said they were petrified of them – mostly because of the pictures in them. These horrifying sketches were the things that kept them up at night with nightmares when they were kids, so if that’s the case, then SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK is going to bring them right back to their childhood.  Personally, I should tell you that I have not read any of the books, I’ve only seen the movie, so my opinion is a bit different when it comes to this film. In my humble opinion, this film is a great horror movie and has loads of imagery that stay with you hours after you’ve seen it, but I do have a lingering issue. My only problem with SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK is those same images of scary crazy looking “monsters” overshadow the fact that the story is a bit choppy and doesn’t flow together quite right.  When the possessed book in the movie is discovered and read, that’s when the stories from the book are ghostly written for each of the characters we follow. Some of these stories have a connection to the characters and some do not. That’s where it gets a little confusing for me. There are missing plot points/questions that don’t get answered and are left to your imagination. They’re hidden behind all the weird psychotic looking creatures in the film. It’s almost like the characters in the story got thrown into a music video by the band Tool and the audience is just supposed to accept that without any explanation why they’re in that particular scenario.  Now like I said, this isn’t the case with all of the stories in the movie. Some of them actually give you a reason why a particular story was written for a character and why that character is being chased by something, but for the most part each story needed more development. If they would have done that, then audience would have had more of a connection to the characters on an emotional level as opposed to just a level of “WTF is that thing chasing them?!”. Now I am aware this is a horror movie and I’m diving waaaaaay too deep into the story and it sounds like I’m just looking for things to find wrong with the movie, which (honestly) is not the case. I really did enjoy the movie and I would say, if you read the books, love scary movies and you’re a fan of the band Tool (LOL), then go see SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK in theaters, otherwise wait to watch this one at home because either way it’s worth it. Until next time, thanks for reading.

P.S. – There is no post credit scene.