Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019)

Here is another Halloween offering for fans of horror movies. However, with a title like "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark" and a PG-13 rating, we have to manage our expectations and not expect too much or anything too extreme. While the term horror is synonymous with gore and other disgusting stuff, this tameness may be a put off so some hard core fans. All I can say is not to write this off quite so fast. While Scary Stories may be geared towards the younger audience, it does have a decent set-up which is a lot more than most of the new horror movies, and a fair amount of creepy scares. It all works thanks to a good story flow that carries the movie through nicely even though we can more or less guess what will happen next. The involvement of Guillermo del Toro can be felt with some of the design and look of the scary monsters. 

The era of the story is set in the 1960's and involves a bunch of teenagers in a small American town. This has been done countless of times before and very successfully in the recent Stranger Things TV series and IT movies. Don't expect Scary Stories to have have the block buster feel of Stranger Things or the extreme horror of IT. I would that that it still manages to succeed in its own modest way and works as a Halloween movie for the teenage and younger audience. It kind of reminds me of how I feel when I go for a rollercoaster ride or enter a haunted house attraction in a funfair. It is familiar, you sort of know what happens next, but you can't help yourself for enjoying it and even going in to experience it all over again! 

There may be no end credits teasers here, but Lana del Rey's haunting voice singing Season of the Witch was reason enough for me to sit through the end credits.