How did we keep track of people before cell phones? I was there and I don’t remember. Did parents just shrug their shoulders and say, “I dunno where Billy is … whatchagonndo?” That simultaneously seems so familiar and so foreign. By the time I hit the age of, say, 14, if I wasn’t in school or bed, my own parents would probably not have been able to locate me 60% of the time. I can’t even imagine that. Not anymore.
This, of course, is half the joy of these throwback horrors like Super 8 and “Stranger Things.” In days past, if the kid was out of eye range, they might just be lost forever to the Upside-Down or Moonies. Nope, I guess Billy is a Jehovah’s Witness now, poor kid. Hey, he made choices. Billy made the mistake of living; we told him not to do that, but, eh, kids. *shrug*
It is Halloween night in 1968 small town Pennsylvania and the Nerd Herd – or whatever the 1968 equivalent would be called- is out for revenge. How can we tell Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Chuck (Austin Zajur), and Auggie (Gabriel Rush) are nerds? Well, if you couldn’t tell just from the name “Auggie,” then maybe this hint will help: Chuck is dressed not as a clown, but as “Pierrot,” (Websters: “a stock male character in French pantomime”) As clowns go, Pierrot doesn’t have quite the Pennywise feel. Geez, Chuck, you cannot get abused often or hard enough, can you?
Get this, the revenge on their bullies backfires (NO!) and the three take to the lam, collecting drifter Ramón (Michael Garza) from a drive-in movie in the process. All four end up at a genuine haunted house. Not a Halloween haunted house, mind you, but a house that is haunted and it happens to be Halloween. Did that make any snese?
Yes, I did that on purpose.
Now in this particular “vacant” house, a girl named Sarah Bellows died many moons ago. Death didn’t stop the girl from telling stories … in blood. The stories are like Aesop’s fables, concise and pointed, but unlike Aesop’s fables, they’re hand-written, and the moral of the story always 
seems to be, “don’t read the story.” Why? Because Sarah’s stories come true. And Stella finds Sarah’s book and claims it not unlike Frodo claiming the One Ring. Yeah, it’s only a matter of time before Sarah starts writing some more. The bottom line is once the ghostly pen starts writing, the words become reality, lethal and dark reality. Cool, huh?
You get the deal here: bloody words appear, bloody deeds happen … there is no escape. Sarah is pretty good at manipulating reality from beyond the grave. Maybe Freddy Krueger good with an emphasis on fear over bloodlust. The tales are suitably creepy and we lose a playah with each new trip to the woodshed. While the horror is inventive enough, the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark personality collection was fairly run-of-the-mill; in retrospect, it was hard to feel for the plight of Stella when I couldn’t even remember her name. And while the standard horror trope of geographic isolation is both nurtured and violated in this set of tales, I will always be unimpressed with an all-powerful entity – if it ain’t got limitations, what’s the point? I think there’s more here to like than not, yet this film is best enjoyed as a social event by teens among other teens where it’s flaws will be ignored in favor of camaraderie.
There once was a girl named Sarah
Who was treated oh-so-unfair-a
Her postmortem path
Was unflinching wrath
And heavily applied my-scare-a
Rated PG-13, 108 Minutes
Director: André Øvredal
Writer: Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman & Guillermo del Toro
Genre: Pissed off ghost
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Readers with very active imaginations
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Readers with very active imaginations
