Scary Stories to Watch on a Screen

I can't remember why I queued up Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) - probably because of Guillermo del Toro's involvement as producer. Glad I did. It's a lovely little throwback.

It is set in a small Pennsylvania town in the 60s. Three high-school seniors, Zoe Colleti, Gabriel Rush and Austin Zajur are getting ready for a last Halloween together, where they plan to prank a band of bullies (and incidentally, Zajur's sister who is dating the head bully). They run into the drive-in and hide from the pursuing bullies in a drive-in. They jump into the car of a stranger, a Mexican-American kid "just passing through", Michael Garza.

Since he's saved them, and it's Halloween (and she kind of likes him), Colleti invites Garza to see a haunted house. The local legend is that the family who founded the mill had a deformed daughter that they kept locked up. Children learned that they could sit next to the wall of her cell, and she would tell them scary stories. But then kids started to die. Now, the daughter is dead, and the family gone, but some say, if you ask her to tell you a scary story, she will - and you may not live. So, I don't think I would ask...

They find the cell that the daughter was kept locked in, and Coletti even finds a book of scary stories that looks like it was written by the daughter. Then the bullies show up, and lock the door from the outside. When Garza's sister, Natalie Ganzhorn, objects, they throw her in too.

They get out (with some help?), and Coletti finds a new story in the book. It's about a bully being stalked by a scarecrow - and we watch it come true. Although they don't have any proof, the bully has disappeared. Then, she sees a new story appearing letter by letter in the book. It's "The Big Toe" (I know that one!), and the character's name is that of their friend Gabriel Rush. She calls him and tries to make sure he doesn't eat the toe. But soon, he's gone too.

So we have a plucky band of teens being stalked by a supernatural curse. Coletti is the cute goth girl whose mom ran off leaving her with her dad, not played by Michael Chiklis, but looking like it. Zajur is the annoying jerk, and Rush the (possibly gay) theater kid - although for a gay lad, he is very interested in Zajur's sister. Garza is an outsider, a kid with a car who claims to be "following the crops", but actually has a secret.

The concept of scary stories writing themselves, then coming true is a good one. The part about the locked up daughter is a little clunky, in my opinion. We don't see her (until the very end), we don't know if she is evil or sympathetic (both, it turns out), and she just doesn't seem to be much of a presence. But the combination of nostalgic kid-pic and scary-but-not-too-scary horror makes this just what we were looking for. And even though the body count was a little high, there's a sequel coming up that promises to make everything right. Looking forward to it.