Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark
U/A; Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Cast: Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Gil Bellows, Dean Norris, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, Austin Abrams, Kathleen Pollard
Director: André Øvredal
Rating: 

The popular Alvin Schwartz's Children's horror stories of the same name now has a cinematic turn (Guillermo del Toro shares credit as writer and producer), but it's definitely not all for the better. As staple terror tales go, this one has enough creepy and grotesque elements (corpses, demonic scarecrows, creepy spiders, dark hidden rooms, fleshy ghoul etc.) that would otherwise have scared the bejeesus out of the intended young target audience but lack of coherence and poor compilation of sequences makes this horror flick a little too feeble to be scary.

Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series — three books in total each one comprising 25(or a few more) tales, the first volume of which was published in 1981, may have been pretty popular but it also drew ire for the macabre illustrations by Stephen Gammell. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of this movie adaptation directed by André Øvredal (Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe).