Guillermo del Toro came up with the screen story for this lackluster adaptation of Alvin Schwartz's popular children's horror books.
The late author Alvin Schwartz's "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" series — three books in total, each comprised of between 25 and 29 tales that mostly run a page or two — have captivated children since the first volume's publication in 1981. They've also, due to their macabre subject matter and eerie illustrations by Stephen Gammell, drawn ire from prudish adults.
The cleverest conceit is to give the "stories" themselves their own origin. They're the product of a vengeful spirit named Sarah Bellows , who writes them in blood within a cursed tome. If you're the subject of the tale, your doom is assured. As one of our petrified protagonists notes, "The book reads you!"
It's all rather ineffective window dressing , though give del Toro credit for at least mentioning 'Nam where Quentin Tarantino cheekily and recklessly effaced it from his own 1960s head trip,however, for setting a scene at a drive-in showing and reformatting that film's 1.37 aspect ratio to a modern-era friendly 1.78. Sacrilege! We'll call the needle-dropping of "Season of the Witch" by Donovan a draw.
All of these beasties are "scary." Though they'd be much more so if they felt less like franchisable IP and more like fervent expressions of the ills of the eras on which the film aims to comment.
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