There’s something almost poetic about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark taking a series of gloriously creepy, minimalist campfire tales and turning them into a PG-13 episode of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” directed by someone who just discovered Instagram filters.
This is a movie based on Alvin Schwartz’s nightmare fuel books and Stephen Gammell’s deranged, iconic drawings—the ones that traumatized entire generations of schoolchildren who just wanted to read something harmless from the library and instead met The Pale Lady at 2 a.m. in their dreams. So you’d think this film would be terrifying.
Instead, it’s… fine. Polite. Mildly spooky. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Halloween haunted house at a church: yes, there are monsters, but no, you’re never really in danger.
Plot: Goosebumps, But With Vietnam
The film is set in 1968 in the fictional town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, because apparently the horror wasn’t enough and we needed the Vietnam War and Nixon-era Americana for ambiance.
We follow Stella, the token shy horror nerd, and her friends Auggie and Chuck, who decide on Halloween to break into the local haunted house—that of the Bellows family. They drag along Ramón, a mysterious stranger and draft-dodger with soulful eyes and “I am literally only here to react to things” energy.
Inside, they find:
-
A secret room
-
A creepy old book
-
The tragic backstory of Sarah Bellows, the albino girl locked away and blamed for child murders in 1898
Naturally, Stella steals the book. Because if horror has taught us anything, it’s that taking cursed objects home is a victimless crime.
From here, spooky stories literally start writing themselves in blood inside the book, starring Stella’s friends as the victims. This sounds cool. In practice, it’s like watching the film frantically check items off a fan-service checklist:
-
✅ “Harold”
-
✅ “The Big Toe”
-
✅ “The Red Spot”
-
✅ “The Dream”
-
✅ Some jangly nonsense that remembers being scary in someone else’s movie
The Monsters: Nailed the Look, Forgot the Job
The nicest thing you can say about the film is this: the creatures look amazing. They’re ripped straight from the books, like someone asked, “What if we made the pictures move and gave children a fresh reason to need therapy?”
-
Harold the Scarecrow? Delightfully gross, full of burlap menace.
-
The Pale Lady? A walking sleep-paralysis demon with the charisma of a slow-moving panic attack.
-
The Big Toe corpse? Disgusting in all the right ways.
-
The Jangly Man? Pure contortionist nightmare fuel.
But instead of building dread around these entities, the movie just kind of drops them into self-contained mini set pieces, each with:
-
Setup
-
“Oh no, it’s that thing from the book!”
-
One chase
-
Fade to next subplot
They’re visually faithful and thematically toothless—like seeing your childhood monster in HD only to realize it’s there for a photo op, not to actually wreck you.
PG-13 Horror: The Coward’s Curse
You can feel the movie wanting to be brutal—but also desperately wanting that teen rating. It’s constantly hitting the brakes right when things could get memorable.
Tommy turning into a scarecrow?
Cool idea. But most of it happens off-screen or in quick cuts. No lingering horror, no genuine shock. Just: stab, hay vomit, poof, next.
Auggie eaten by a corpse under the bed?
Awesome premise. But again, we get “suggested horror” instead of full-on terror. It’s the horror equivalent of “parental guidance recommended”: lots of tension, very little consequence you actually see.
The whole film lives in this awkward middle ground: too grim for little kids, too tame and predictable for horror fans. It keeps promising to go somewhere wild, then remembers it has to sell tickets to nervous parents and pulls back.
Emotional Depth: Lightly Sprinkled on Top
To be fair, the movie tries to have emotional weight:
-
Stella has abandonment issues, a dead mom, and an awkward relationship with her dad.
-
Ramón faces racism and the trauma of his brother’s brutal death in Vietnam.
-
Sarah Bellows is a tragic abuse victim framed by her toxic, industrialist family.
All good ingredients. But the script treats most of this like seasoning rather than substance. We get monologues about pain, quick glimpses of trauma, then immediately jump back into “okay but which monster is next?” mode.
It wants to be about stories hurting people, about history repeating itself, about the power of truth. But it’s also about a scarecrow stabbing a bully and a pimple exploding into spiders. The tonal whiplash is real.
The Book of Convenient Plot Devices
Sarah’s cursed book is supposedly this unstoppable force that writes new nightmare stories in blood and kills kids in accordance with their worst fears.
Except:
-
It only attacks people in the friend group + bully + sister.
-
It can apparently be negotiated with if Stella just… promises to clear Sarah’s name?
-
It vanishes all the monsters when Stella writes the truth about Sarah in her own blood, because Horror Contracts, I guess.
The logic of the curse is less “ancient malevolent force” and more “petulant DM who just wants to be understood.” Sarah’s grudge against the town is legit—her family poisoned children with mercury and blamed her for it—but the way the curse works is deeply arbitrary.
Why target these kids specifically? Why now? Why does promising to write a newspaper feature make the ghost chill out after a century of rage? Because the runtime says so, that’s why.
The Ending: Trauma, But Make It Sequel-Friendly
By the end, Stella’s written the truth about Sarah Bellows, the monsters are gone, the curse is broken-ish, and Ramón is off to Vietnam after an emotional goodbye.
Chuck and Auggie, however, are still missing, presumably stuck in monster limbo or inside some cursed narrative space that the movie doesn’t bother to explain. Ruth is back from her spider eruption but traumatized. Stella vows to find a way to bring her friends back, setting up a sequel hook.
So we end with:
-
Dead(?) friends
-
Still-traumatized survivors
-
A ghost problem “solved” via op-ed
-
And an open invite for Scary Stories 2: Even Darker, Still Not That Scary
It’s less an ending and more a soft pitch.
The Real Horror: Wasted Potential
What stings most is how much potential this had:
-
Guillermo del Toro producing
-
Source material beloved and feared for decades
-
Stunning creature designs
-
A period setting rich with social tension
And yet the film feels weirdly safe. Toothless. It checks off stories fans recognize—“Harold,” “The Big Toe,” “The Red Spot,” “The Dream,” “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker”—but doesn’t do anything especially bold with them. It’s like a haunted-house greatest-hits album where every track ends right before the breakdown.
Imagine:
-
An anthology format, letting each story fully breathe.
-
More creative ways the stories intersect or warp reality.
-
Actual consequences beyond neat fade-outs and sequel bait.
Instead, we get a YA adventure with horror decals.
Final Verdict: Mildly Creepy Nostalgia, Lightly Toasted
If you grew up on the books, the film has some fleeting joys:
-
Seeing those grotesque illustrations come to life
-
Recognizing stories and creatures
-
Catching del Toro’s fingerprints on the creature design
But if you’re looking for something truly scary, or genuinely daring, or emotionally devastating in the way those original drawings were? This ain’t it.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a spooky starter pack: perfect for easing middle schoolers into horror, frustrating for anyone who wanted the movie to hit as hard as the books did at 3 a.m. under a blanket with a flashlight.
It’s not a disaster. It’s just… safe. And “safe” should probably be illegal in a movie whose source material once convinced children that every shadow had a face.
