<em>Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark</em> Doesn’t Get What Makes Stories Scary
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the new film adaptation of the collection of children’s books by the same name, wants you to know that stories have power. At both the beginning and the end of the movie, a voice-over reminds the audience: “Stories hurt, stories heal. If we repeat them often enough, they become real. They have that power.”
In the movie, that power is magical, sinister, and channeled through a physical book. Stories appear on the pages (written in blood, naturally) and then play out in the real world. Our heroes—a ragtag group of nerdy high-school students, and a mysterious stranger who’s passing through town—are on a mission to stop the book before they each feature in their own narrative, with possibly fatal is an entertaining homage to the original books, it can’t help but dilute the power of the stories it tells.
