Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
Directed by André Øvredal
Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, Halloween night, 1968. After playing a joke on a school bully, Stella and her friends decide to sneak into a supposedly haunted house that once belonged to the powerful Bellows family, unleashing dark forces that they will be unable to control.
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Aunque ahora el referente que se mencionará al hablar de este (más complejo de lo acostumbrado) ómnibus de relatos de terror unidos por un libro hechizado escrito con sangre humana, será la televisiva Stranger Things (un grupo de amigos adolescentes unidos frente a lo sobrenatural… pero en 1968), o incluso la reformulación que Andy Muschietti ha hecho del opus del pope Stephen King en It, lo cierto es que Historias de miedo para contar en la oscuridad pertenece al imaginario de su productor y autor del argumento: Guillermo Del Toro.
There are a lot of parallels to the Stephen King horror juggernaut It, and when the nerdy Auggie dresses as a clown for Halloween, it is surely meant as a jab at the competition.
Forget the effects-laden remake – this version of It, released as a miniseries in 1986, is the most terrifying adaptation of Stephen King's beloved novel to date.
Scary Stories feels like it’s more for a middle-school aged audience than anyone old enough to see IT .
Most modern horror falls into two general categories – the hard R with extreme levels of graphic violence and vivisections (such as Raw), and the more general-audience softer-R to the hard PG-13 flavor which is more supernatural thriller (“ Stephen King’s It,” “Stranger Things,” “Get Out,” and “ It Follows” ).
The movie uses the Nixon-Agnew election the same way Warren Beatty and Robert Towne did in Shampoo—as a barbed backdrop to personal calamity.
The concept of angry ghosts and children exposing family secrets has been Del Toro’s go-to device for years, going back to his masterful 2001 “The Devil’s Backbone” and less impressive credits as a producer like 2013’s “Mama.”
A generation cut their teeth on R.L. Stine’s ‘Goosebumps’, devouring forbidden stories of devious child heroes and things that go bump in the night, before graduating to Steven King works.
Much like 2015’s Goosebumps , André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark follows a group of teenagers who play around with a book that they have no business touching.
Writers Dan and Kevin Hagerman (with story credits for del Toro, Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) have settled on an approach that honestly is not that much unlike the 2015 adaptation of “Goosebumps.”
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Once the sun finally sets, Øvredal and his cinematographer, Roman Osin (Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice), show they are not the least bit afraid of the dark and using darkness to tell their story.
For years, the director has helped nurture smaller projects and his name is attached to several gems, including The Orphanage and Julia’s Eyes .
Each is rendered as a close copy of the original illustration, brought to life by talented performers such as Javier Botet, whose mastery of the physicality of his characters brought pure terror to the likes of It and The Conjuring 2 .
The cast includes Zoe Margaret Colletti ( Annie 2014), Michael Garza ( The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I 2014), Austin Abrams ( The Walking Dead TV series), Gabriel Rush ( The Grand Budapest Hotel 2014), Austin Zajur ( Vanoss Superhero School TV series), Dean Norris ( Breaking Bad TV series) and Natalie Ganzhorn ( The Night Before Halloween 2016).