The late American writer and folklorist Alvin Schwartz tapped into the minds of young readers and traumatized generations of eager children by telling otherwise PG-13 horror tales with a transgressive, R-rated glee that made kids feel like they had read something they weren’t supposed to. There’s hardly a millennial in the United States who wasn’t happily scarred by the three volumes of Schwartz’s “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” series, and couldn’t describe Stephen Gammell’s rotting illustrations to their therapist in all of their red and blue detail.

André Øverdal’s film adaptation, as clever and well-crafted as it is, can’t help but invert the formula that the source material relied upon for its success. Here is an R-rated concept…

Interesting approach to the fabled nightmare stories of my generations youth... gateway horror that lands somewhere between Goosebumps and It—utilizing setpiece style scares reminiscent of the latter, and managing to feel just as sincere (if not more?) than either.

I absolutely LOVED the first act of this movie: the mood, setting, season of the witch needle drop, editing, and how the story unfolded was right up my alley—mixing legit better than/darker than expected scares and big set piece after big set piece for each of the recognizable nightmare illustrations come to life. I was totally invested and ready to slap 4 stars all over this but unfortunately after the ‘let’s go visit the voodoo lady who tells us we’re doomed’ trope…

85

An autumn ode to innocence lost and reality's lingering, omnipresent stain, whether embodied in the people of the present or the names of history. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark depicts a world where children start to grapple with the very-real horrors beyond the drive-in - that the scariest stories are often real, and are always in the process of being re-written. It isn't that scarecrows or spiders or boogeymen aren't terrifying (as it is seen in this film, they very much are), but they pale in comparison to draft notices, systemic racism, and old town secrets, haunting the air and refusing to shed their light, instead consuming a new generation of victims. So much of this is…

Why are we so stuck on 80s and 90s nostalgia? There’s the obvious reasoning: that the folks who came of age during those periods are now the ones crafting our pop art, and thus reliving their youths through wistful filmic remembrances of synth scores, tacky merchandising, loud fashions, and direct references to movies that, more often than not, gained a cult following much later than their initial releases (see: THE THING posters on the STRANGER THINGS kids' walls). But maybe it’s also a way to escape into the re-tooled memory of a time that wasn’t “better”, per se, but at least provided a sense of comforting fantasy while our present world is being shot to hell by despotic men in…