Jukebox musical with horror frissons

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This article was published 09/08/2019 (2339 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The past few weeks have seen the release of two movies set in the late ’60s: Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Hollywood is, of course, Quentin Tarantino’s painstaking recreation of 1969, the year the love generation went twisted courtesy of the Manson family. Scary Stories, directed by Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe), adapts a collection of kid-targeted tales from Alvin Schwartz published in the 1980s. How it came to be set in 1968, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s election, is one of its subtle points of interest.

Though produced by horror maestro Guillermo del Toro, the movie takes the same approach as the recent Goosebumps movies. It finds a way to harvest references to a handful of different stories and streamline them into a single narrative.

Think of it as a jukebox musical, but with horror frissons instead of some artist’s greatest hits.

At the nucleus of the action is Stella (Zoe Colletti), a nerdy girl who happens to be obsessed with the scary genre and aspires to be a horror writer herself.

Abandoned by her mother, she mostly stays close to her depressed dad (Dean Norris), but she can’t resist a Halloween adventure with her two platonic friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur), involving pranking Tommy (Austin Abrams), a sneering neighbourhood tough.

Subsequently obliged to escape from Tommy, Stella hitches a ride with the handsome, mysterious and homeless Ramon (Michael Garza), which takes them to the long-abandoned house of local legend Sarah Bellows.

At the turn of the century, it is rumoured Sarah — locked in a room of her wealthy family’s house — would tell stories to the neighbourhood kids that would result in the disappearance or death of her audience.

Stella uncovers Sarah’s book of stories, only to discover the tome has a tendency to unravel new stories — written in blood — which feature her friends falling victim to the various monsters of Sarah’s twisted imagination. As the story reveals itself on the page, so does the story play out in reality.

With a screenplay by fraternal team Dan and Kevin Hageman (Trollhunters, The Lego Movie), the film is somewhat hampered by its cumbersome master narrative.

The portmanteau-style thriller, which offers up a series of unrelated stories, has included some terrifically fun genre films such as Dead of Night, Creepshow, Trilogy of Terror and Trick ’r Treat.

One senses it could have been brought off here with Schwartz’s partly decomposed body of work. But alas, the tales that made the cut here — Harold, The Big Toe, Me Tie Dough-ty Walker! and The Red Spot among others — feel more like cameos than guest stars.

Yet, the movie does manage a few moments of memorable chills, largely due to some of its nightmare-fuelled creatures, but also thanks to Colletti’s soulful performance.

As for that specific time period, it turns out it dovetails nicely with the backstory of the demonic Sarah, with the whispers of turn-of-the-century child sacrifice repeating themselves loud and clear in the era of the Vietnam War.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing