'Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark' Is an Effectively Scary Horror Film That Doesn't Quite Know Its Demographic

Before I watched this movie, I didn't think this movie would be that scary because A) it's based on a children's book, and B) it's PG-13.

Oh, young Jonathan. You, poor, naive idiot.

Here We Go!

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a horror film written by Dan and Kevin Hageman and directed by André Øvredal. The movie is based on the old children's book series of the same name that from what I know, a lot of people like.

This film follows a group of teenagers who discover a book of scary stories in a haunted house, and soon find that the book starts writing stories on its own, using the names of the teenagers as the main characters, and as the stories get written, the events of the story happen in real life.

Now, I never read the old books, which is why I went into this movie blind, so this movie was able to surprise me with how actually disturbing and frightening a lot of the horror sequences were.

A lot of really horrifying events happen in the movie, and there is one particular scene that can really get under your skin with how disturbing it is and how hard it is to watch.

I'd say the first 20-30 minutes are the weakest part of the movie, because it relied a little bit too much on scaring you with loud noises instead of actually scary ideas, and it isn't a movie that immediately hooks you from the opening scene.

But after that, once the horrifying stuff starts, and the main premise kicks in, it becomes a movie with a lot of really scary scenes and the story is also pretty interesting throughout.

This movie's scares only hold back in terms of the gore. I thought the creature designs were very disturbing, but the CGI for one of the monsters (seen in the picture above) wasn't too convincing.

Also, the main characters are a bunch of teenagers, who aren't as interesting as they could be, but they're still pretty watchable, and you care about them just enough to worry when bad things start happening.

The performances are all pretty great. The actors do a pretty good job of acting scared, and the stand-out performance of the film is the lead, portrayed by Zoe Margaret Colletti.

She was great in the whole movie, but towards the end, when her performance requires more dramatic acting, she pulls it off perfectly, and I think she has the talent to become an A-list actress with what she was able to do in this movie.

Now, I've talked about some positives and negatives with this movie, but I think the biggest problem with the movie is that it doesn't quite know what its target demographic is.

Because even though this movie is based on a children's novel, I think this movie is way too scary for kids. The horror sequences are incredibly disturbing, and the Red Room sequence in the movie was so frightening that even I needed to cover my eyes from how afraid I was.

Put simply, this movie is not for kids. It's a PG-13 movie for a reason, and the only kids that would be able to watch this movie are the ones that have already read the books.

But besides that, I think this is a pretty good horror movie that has a lot of pretty scary scenes (and a good amount of cheap jump scares), great performances, okay characters, and overall, I was able to have a good time with this movie.

I'm gonna give 'Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark' an 8/10 (B).

Just don't take your kids to it, because again, this movie has murders and really messed up stuff that probably wouldn't be good for kids under the age of 13.

Thank you so much for reading.