Review: “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”

 

ØVREDAL, André, “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”, CBS Films/Entertainment One, 2020.

The ongoing pandemic is clearly continuing to be a dumping-ground for film studios’ misbegotten creations which they seek to disavow. This horror is a prime example. This movie was released in the US in 2019 and got a fair reception; it’s obvious to me however, why it has been snuck into this country on DVD while everyone – it’s assumed – is looking the other way.

I wasn’t at all interested in this when I saw it at the supermarket; but I was buying something else and the deal of the day was “two for $20”, so I grabbed this to score the discount. The two things that clinched the deal for me were the picture of Dean Norris on the back of the packaging (I quite liked his work in “Breaking Bad”) and the fact that Guillermo del Toro was listed as the producer. Turns out, M. Norris is a trivial element of the tale and del Toro’s input was lacklustre at best… or farcical at worst.

As I started watching this, I had this weird sensation: something didn’t click. The further I got into it, the more I felt that I wasn’t working with all of the required information; that there was something going on I wasn’t privy to. This started to irk me but, before I could examine it, I got distracted by the scarecrow:

When I was a kid, I watched a Disney film about a guy called Dr. Syn who dressed up as a scarecrow and rode out into the night to do stuff. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, or why – I was only eight or so, so the intricacies of the plot eluded me - but there was this cool dude, dressed as a scarecrow and frightening the living daylights out of the bad guys! I was hooked. Later on, I discovered that the film was called “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” and was based on a series of novels by British actor and writer Russell Thorndyke, written from 1915 to 1944. Patrick McGoohan was the actor who played him in the Disney film (which you can watch on YouTube). Ever since that time, scarecrows have always ranked high in the creepy-cool stakes for me, even making me a little leery about “The Wizard of Oz” and those broomsticks in “Fantasia”. Here though, there was a problem:

Is this how scarecrows are made? I’ll admit, I’ve made several of these things in my lifetime and I’ve even dressed up as one for Hallowe’en, and this one looked wrong. As the main villain in the first story of this portmanteau film, he had a chilling enough face (with extra beetles) and the huge hole in his midriff was also cool: it was just his stance that threw me off. Slumping forward from his supporting stick, his arms hang loosely at his sides and his legs are splayed out wide to either side like he’s trying to mark each side of the mouth of a football (ie. soccer) goal. Weird. I was thinking that it’s a good thing that the hole in his tummy was there, otherwise it would look as though that pole he was hanging from had been rammed determinedly up his jacksy. Where I come from, scarecrows are positioned much as you would a person about to be crucified; given the director’s country of origin - or del Toro’s for that matter – is the position of this guy typical of Norwegian, or Mexican, scarecrows? I’m just saying, wherever this pose originates from, it’s got to be a minority expectation, surely.

So, being thrown for a loop by the ludicrous positioning of the straw man, I began to tune in once more to the plot. As stated, this is a collection of separate stories tied together with some tenuous connective thread. That’s fine; I’ve seen “Creepshow” and its associated ilk since back in the 80s – I’m down with that. This time however, it was the clunkiest stitching together of unconnected narratives I think I’ve ever seen. Three of the stories are based upon a clumsy info-dump issued by the targeted characters shortly before the horrors manifest to claim them and, to add insult to injury, make no sense, or fracture the exact logic that they try to create. In “The Big Toe” – why would anyone, having just discovered a human toe in their backyard, put that item into a stew that they were intending to serve to their family as an evening meal? And who, having been served such a meal, would eat it? I was bewildered. Then, another character claims to have been experiencing a bizarre dream about meeting a pale woman in a red room. He does meet said woman immediately thereafter, but in a series of white corridors under flashing red lights. So, no red room; not so much. And the Latino lad hears a nonsensical string of verbiage (“me tie dough-ty walker”) and immediately remembers – at length - a campfire story about another horrific entity and neither he nor the ensuing “Jangly-Man” explain, at all, what this piece of doggerel means. Deeply unsatisfying…

So, I watched while the film ran to the end of its train-ride. Nothing was unexpected and nothing was explained and certainly nothing was particularly horrifying. I was thinking: has del Toro completely lost his touch? I mean, this is what he’s coming to, off of winning an Oscar for “The Shape of Water”? This is a low bar, possibly even lower than “Crimson Peak”: a complete non-event B-grade waste of film stock with a hyper-inflated special effects budget. In desperation I turned to the special features on the DVD and finally received enlightenment: this is based on a book! In fact, it’s based on a three-book series of collected horror stories that apparently were a bit of a cause célèbre in the US in the 90s:

Collected and re-told by Alvin Schwartz starting in 1981, the books were a young adult publishing sensation in America, since they gathered together all of the campfire yarns and urban legends prevalent in youth culture at the time, beefing them up with some lesser known Poe trifles and other odds-and-ends of folklore. Highlighting the creepy stories were a series of gruesome monochrome images by Stephen Gammell which became integral to the overall tone of the books (a reprint in 2011 with art by Brett Helquist met with strong opposition and forced a further re-issue with the original art restored). In 1984, another collection – More Scary Stories to tell in the Dark – was released, and a third compilation – Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones – was produced in 1991. Other titles have appeared, but these were not written by Schwartz who had died by that time. In the background of the censorious rumblings that led to “Parental Advisory” stickers being stamped onto popular music of the time, these books were denounced and burned, banned and then liberated from banning, in repeated waves of attempted libricide by the morally self-appointed religious bigots of the US, seeking to “protect the youth” of that country, a collective youth who, like Charlton Heston, would only see their beloved scary stories prised from their cold, dead hands. From what I can tell (not being au fait with the books), the stories reproduced in this film are the following:

“Harold”

“The Big Toe”

“The Red Spot”

“The Dream”

“Me Tie Dough-ty Walker”

“The Haunted House”

…with other stories hinted at during the run-time. All of these tales come from either the first book by Schwartz or the last: did del Toro not like the second book, one wonders? It’s clear that what he does like is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which provides much of the framing device for these lacklustre re-tellings, along with the main character Stella. So, my reading experience was of some use after all...

This is what is missing from this film. For someone like me who, until I Googled all of this stuff, had no idea that any of these things had occurred, this film makes absolutely no sense. This is a love note to a treasured literary series that automatically alienates itself from everyone unfamiliar with its source material. I guess that CBS and Entertainment One were figuring on only distributing this film in the US and that everyone else could go jump up a rope. This is narrow thinking and piss-poor marketing, allowing lazy screen-writing and bad execution. Dumb.

As someone who never grew up with campfire tales (or the sort of camps at which they are a feature), I would have welcomed the opportunity to become familiar with the source code of this phenomenon; to be made aware of this cultural icon; to be welcomed into this fold of fandom. But no, I was simply told “if you don’t know, then screw you!” and fobbed of with this lazy, ill-conceived shit. Thanks for nothing; and you can take my $10 and add it to your Scrooge McDuck money bin.

As far as it goes (and it doesn’t strive to go that far, or with any effort) this will fill an empty night but will – for people in the same position as myself – be more annoying than satisfying. It relies on sloppy narrative tropes – because that’s what the books were highlighting: “have you checked the children?”; the killer’s hook hand is stuck to the car-door handle – and it doesn’t struggle very hard, or with any finesse, to work these into its narrative frame. The Hollywood Playbook ensures that all irritating characters get whacked so that only the attractive ones and the ones “in lerv!” survive, and it tries wa-a-a-a-ay too hard to convince us that it’s 1968 for no real reason whatsoever (seriously - what was the point?). And Dean "blink and you'll miss him" Norris is completely wasted.

My one heartfelt takeaway from this is that all the Americans who watch this will take one look at Harold the Scarecrow and go… WTF?

Two-and-a-Half Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Postscript: So here's a picture of "Harold" by Stephen Gammell from the book:

It seems that the makers of this flick were just being doggedly faithful to the source material. Still looks dumb. Maybe they should have just let it go...