scary stories to tell in the dark cast august

#Scary stories to tell in the dark cast august full#

But Scary Stories also offers its victim-victimizer a chance to break the cycle, through storytelling-by rewriting her narrative. Like the recent Ma, Scary Stories is about how the abused can become abusers, seeming to appeal to bullies through self-interest. Meanwhile, Stella confronts the kids’ demonic assailant, Sarah, a scribe made mean by the torment meted out by her family. Often, the film’s various creatures-based on Stephen Gammell’s original, evocative illustrations-feel like manifestations of the war overseas, come home to roost on the streets of Podunk, America. Ramón turns out to be a draft dodger on the lam, not wanting to be shipped off to the jungle after his brother came home in pieces he’s attacked by body parts able to disassemble and reassemble into a monster man who calls him a coward. And one of Stella’s pals, Auggie (Gabriel Rush), a horndog who resents his stepdad, is dragged into a hellish dimension by a rotting corpse for tasting a stew cooked with one of the ghoulie’s toes.īut once Scary Stories gets past what feels like submission to genre demands, and the many characters are reduced by attrition, the drama reaffirms its focus on the central themes. The high school bully, Tommy (Austin Abrams), freshly signed up to kill commies overseas, is turned into a scarecrow, which doesn’t feel like a deliciously ironic comeuppance. But too often the supernatural slayings feel disconnected from the preceding character development. The filmmakers, at first, take their time getting to the spooky stuff, reveling in midcentury American suburbia in autumn and the circumstances of its characters. Then, usually at night, a new story scrawls itself in the book, and the frights begin, often nearing their climaxes with extended stretches of tension-ratcheting silence. During the day, Stella and her friends run around town, looking for explanations for what’s happening: from microfilm at the library, the records room in an abandoned sub-basement of a hospital, or the Bellows’ former maid’s now-elderly daughter. Soon, new ones begin to be written as if by magic-and in fresh blood!-targeting the kids with death by monsters from American folk tales.Īs in 2015’s Goosebumps and its 2018 Halloween-themed sequel-both adapted from another keystone in millennial literary horror nostalgia-the source material itself is a central plot device in Scary Stories. These outsiders stumble upon her secret room and then her secret book of stories, which Stella takes. Fleeing bullies while the townsfolk trick-or-treat, they meet Ramón (Michael Garza), the new kid in town, and show him a haunted 19th-century mansion, shrouded in fog and bathed in moonlight, where the supposedly kid-killing Sarah Bellows once lived, whispering scary stories through its walls to children. In this modern-seeming milieu lives Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), a pubescent misfit with a few similarly uncool guy friends. Instead, the film’s time period is established by presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s frequent appearance on television screens and repeated reminders of the conflict in Southeast Asia. Though set in 1968, from Halloween to Election Day, Scary Stories avoids flower-power signifiers. Screenwriters Dan and Kevin Hageman haven’t adapted the omnibus source material as a horror anthology, instead incorporating a selection of the books’ hair-raisers as set pieces within a larger narrative about the power of storytelling and the Vietnam War. This film adaptation retains the archetypal settings-here bundled into a semirural mill town in Pennsylvania-but opens up the emotional and psychological lives of its heroes and villains.

#Scary stories to tell in the dark cast august full#

Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books are full of horror stories taken from folklore and presented like fairy tales-just a few short pages of action, populated with stock characters stripped of inner lives, set in nondescript American Anytowns.