Strange and Scary Things

Why the 2019 adaptation of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" was not very good

The 2019 adaptation of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” is not a horrible film. But as an adaptation of the books by Alvin Schwarz and Stephen Gammel, it’s underwhelming. Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and directed by Andre Overdal, it would at first seem an ideal adaptation for the iconic series of the books.

The movie has a point-of-view, part of which is the foresight to be set in 1968, amidst the backdrop of social upheaval. It makes sense because the world of Scary Stories felt much older, thus setting the film in the present day wouldn’t really work.

We’re given some likeable but generic characters in the form of Stella Nicholls, the writer girl, Ramon Morales, the smart draft dodger and the comic duo of the debonair August Hildebrandt and Chuck Steinberg as well as Ruth Steinberg, his pretty sister.

Stella finds the book of Scary Stories which was written by Sarah Bellows, an outcast who was institutionalized for being a truth-teller. The book is the device through which the stories are introduced to the teen characters, as the book begins to write stories about the various characters which cause the same fates to befall them.

What the film lacks, is any of the folksy creepiness of the original books. It’s a classic but true complaint of authors that screenwriters think they are too smart to simply adapt what is on the page. The screenwriters often change minor details for no reason or worst, butcher the text at hand.

This can make sense because a one-to-one adaptation is not always valuable, but often what we get is simplified for the screen. In the screenwriter’s efforts to simplify and to appeal, they lost the charm of the book. Little of the original stories is preserved.

The screenwriters and filmmakers didn’t see “Scary Stories to tell in the Dark” as books to be adapted. Rather it was seen as intellectual property to be mined for further exploitation. The Stephen Gammell illustrations are iconic, and the book was bought so these illustrations could be harvested for their IP value. The stories and the context of the illustrations was lost entirely. The result is that the monsters removed from the context in which they were scary become elaborate special effects.

In this essay (which was supposed to brief,oops), I want to approach each of the monsters in the context of the original book to show how the film made a hash of them.

First, for those who haven’t read it; “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” was a collaboration between the folklorist Alvin Schwartz and the Illustrator Stephen Gammell. Schwarz not only drew on a lot of traditional ghost stories but also literary sources, often from the Victorian era.

Part of the intention of the book it would seem would be to introduce horror movie watching preteens not only to books but to the folklore that horror films were drawn from. The writing and the terrifying drawings by Stephen Gammell draw you in and then if you wish to learn more, there are copious endnotes which reference important works on American folklore.

The story “The Dream” from “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” is one of the literary works adapted for the book which eventually became a set piece in the 2019 film. It contains this memorable illustration of an entity that has been dubbed “The Pale Lady”

Why is the pale lady from “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” scary? People who read the book by flipping through the illustrations would probably assume that she’s some sort of demon. This seems to be what the screenwriters assumed as well.

The story in “Scary Stories 3” has been adapted from Augustus Hare’s autobiography which I can’t find a copy of online. In the Schwartz version, the main character Lucy Morgan is an artist and travels around to small towns painting and staying in boarding houses. She is planning to leave the town she is in and go to Kingston;

“But that night Lucy Morgan had a strange dream. She dreamed that she was walking up a dark, carved staircase and entered a bedroom. It was an ordinary room except for two things. The carpet was made up of large squares that looked like trapdoors. And each of the windows was fastened shut with big nails that stuck up out of the wood.

In her dream Lucy Morgan went to sleep in that bedroom. During the night a woman with a pale face and black eyes and long black hair came into the room. She leaned over the bed and whispered, “This is an evil place. Flee while you can.” When the woman touched her arm to hurry her along, Lucy Morgan awakened from her dream with a shriek. She lay awake the rest of the night trembling.“

Lucy tells her landlady at the boarding house where she is staying about her dream. The landlady sees it as a warning not to go to Kingston. She tells Lucy to go to Dover instead as it’s closer.

When Lucy gets to Dover, she goes to find a place to stay. But The boarding house she finds herself in is the same house in her dream. She is obviously discomfited and the landlady, described as a plump motherly woman, doesn’t understand why.

“‘How do you like it?’ the landlady asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Well, take your time,” the landlady said. “I’ll bring up some tea while you think about it.”

Lucy sat on the bed staring at the trapdoors and the big nails. Soon there was a knock on the door. “It’s the landlady with tea,” she thought.

But it wasn’t the landlady. It was the woman with the pale face and the black eyes and the long black hair. Lucy Morgan grabbed her things and fled. “

This is a good example of how modern horror misses out on the genuinely eerie. What makes the story so unsettling is not the pale lady who we see twice. It’s the fact that the threat is not from her but from whatever was going to befall Lucy in the house.

Also, I love the detail of the carpet that looks like trapdoors. I have no idea what that would look like, but it seems a good metaphor for entrapment and death. Schwartz’s description of the landlady as a plump motherly woman is also unnerving, cleverly playing against expectations. Could she be an accomplice or is she a murderer putting on a facade?

Hare’s story also fits in with a lot of stories in the emerging spiritualist movement which often would be about documenting psychic phenomena. We can see the pale lady as acting as proof of the spiritual world, warning us against real life death. A similar story is the “Room for one more?” legend which originated as a report of a real-world spiritual phenomenon.

On a surface level, the realization of the story looks good in the 2019 film. The pale lady in the film is cool as a mostly practical effect, combining foam latex with CGI upscaling. It’s an impressive but deeply literal interpretation of the Stephen Gammell illustration. But she retains none of the eeriness she had in her original guise.

The creature has been adapted into a literal monster who eats children, she pursues one of the teens and then hugs him, enveloping him into her stomach like a reverse birth. This is icky and would momentarily scare a young horror fan but none of it lingers because the mystery has been lost.

What made the pale lady creepy was her ambiguity. She looked like a demon but was protecting Lucy. When she simply becomes a menacing character, her motives are now all too clear.

Another story whose realization sorely disappoints is the film’s attempt to adapt “Harold” the surprisingly gruesome story about a scarecrow coming to life. The problems of adapting this story are different but also rooted in the film robbing characters of context. “Harold” is a much less subtle kind of horror than “The Dream” in which the pale lady appears.

Nevertheless, the story of Harold is incredibly creepy not only because of the spare prose of Schwartz but of the escalating tension of the situation of the characters. The story is based on a piece of German folklore from the 19^th century but feels very timeless. It concerns the boredom of two farmers and their migratory work

“When it got hot in the valley, Thomas and Alfred drove their cows up to a cool, green pasture in the mountains to graze.”

The routine of caring for the cows “was easy, but oh, it was boring”. Partially to alleviate the boredom and to get rid of crows, they make a scarecrow and nickname it Harold, after another farmer they dislike.

“When they were feeling playful, they would talk to him. One of them might say, "How are the vegetables growing today, Harold?" Then the other, making believe he was Harold, would answer in a crazy voice, "Very slowly." They both would laugh, but not Harold.

Whenever something went wrong, they took it out on Harold. They would curse at him, even kick or punch him. Sometimes one of them would take the food they were eating (which they both were sick of) and smear it on the doll's face. "How do you like that stew, Harold?" he would ask. "Well, you better eat it - or else." Then the two men would howl with laughter.”

Even the detail of the farmer doing the crazy voice for Harold is creepy. Schwarz is brilliant about slowly escalating the tension in the story.

More importantly, this very pastoral setting is perfect for a story about a scarecrow because making these kinds of folk sculptures are precisely what people would do in extreme boredom. Of course, it’s art but it’s also a form of entertainment when there’s nothing happening. And the boredom is sneakily evoked in passing, describing the farmers being sick of the provisions they have brought with them.

Obviously, Harold doesn’t remain dormant. First, they hear Harold grunt and in one of the worst decisions in literature, they decide not to throw him in the fire.

"Let's not do anything stupid," said Alfred. "We don't know what's going on. When we move the cows down, we'll leave him behind. For now, let's just keep an eye on him."

They continue treating Harold badly and then one day notice he is growing.

“Maybe it's just our imagination," Alfred replied. "We have been up here on this mountain for too long."

The next morning, while they were eating, Harold stood up and walked out of the hut. He climbed up on the roof and trotted back and forth, like a horse on its hind legs. All day and all night, he trotted like that. In the morning Harold climbed down and stood in a far corner of the pasture. The men had no idea what he would do next. They were afraid.”

The two farmers decide to flee and they do get away but of course, they realize they have left their milking stools behind. Thomas decides to be the one to go back and Alfred after waiting for him looks down on the shack they have been living in from the top of the hill;

“He looked back for Thomas. He did not see him anywhere. But he did see Harold. The doll was on the roof of the hut again. As Alfred watched, Harold kneeled and stretched out a bloody skin to dry in the sun.”

I remember reading this as a pre-teen and finding it horrifying but also being shocked that the book went that far. In a way, it makes sense that the movie draws so much on “Scary Stories 3”, as it was perhaps the most like a modern horror film of the books.

In the 2019 film, the scarecrow Harold looks like a convincing replica of the Gammel drawing but has been detached from any context. It’s just a scarecrow that happens to be on the property of one of the antagonists of the film, Tommy Milner.

After the remake of Stephen King’s “IT” created the trope that bully characters were not only jerks but dangerous psychopaths, a lot of newer horror films followed suit. Tommy is a psychopath. And at the beginning, it seems as if he will be the film’s major antagonist, but he is the first one to be dispatched.

We see Tommy beating the scarecrow with a bat surrounded by his friends at the start of the film, which seems like something a bad kid would do. It’s not until later when it’s time for Tommy to die that we realize that he lives on a farm and is maybe interacting with the scarecrow more than what we see.

Nevertheless, there’s no belief in the emotional investment Tommy has made in the scarecrow as there was in the original story. Tommy is not bored and away from home, he is living in the modern world and cares about his car and has a girlfriend. The idea that Tommy spends a lot of time beating this elaborately ugly scarecrow is meaningless within the movie.

Tommy is sent on a midnight egg delivery and then runs into the living scarecrow which after some fuckery, stabs him with a pitchfork which is gruesome for a PG-13 film. Then Tommy transforms into a scarecrow in a very body-horror kind of way. Harold doesn’t really move that much, suggesting there was some kind of issue with the effect. It’s fine but once again, more the type of thing that would momentarily cause a preteen to giggle than something to haunt their sleep.

Not only because we missed out on Harold flaying Tommy, as happened in the book, but we missed any of the context of Harold becoming a vessel of frustration and hatred. We missed out on the buildup of escalating small details that builds into the sheer weirdness of Harold cantering about on the roof. The horror of the original story is lost because the film wasn’t interested in it.

The one story that is adapted well is the classic story about the spider laying eggs in a girl's face. This is done gruesomely, and my only real complaint is that the girl is changed from a plain looking girl of Gammel’s illustration to a stereotypically attractive blonde girl.

This story is used as a bit of comeuppance for her supposed vanity. The movie seems to use the monsters as punishment for the perceived faults of its characters. August is skeptical, Chuck is chubby and gluttonous, Ramon is a draft-dodger and Tommy is just an asshole.

Adding this kind of morality to the stories, is emblematic of a lack of imagination. It’s much scarier if a character who is a good person is unjustly punished than if the person being killed had it coming all along. It’s no longer inexplicable.

There is a net loss of mystery in the film. It makes its monsters into marketable IP and more annoyingly; into metaphors.

“Scary Stories” is not an elevated horror film, but it has some of the lazy writing of the worst of that genre. A great deal of elevated horror struggles to convince you of its worthiness. This horror film is not “just” a horror film, it’s a metaphor for death, senility, late capitalism or anorexia.

Obviously, anyone who knows horror knows that most horror films can work as metaphors, but they need to be convincingly horrific first. When a monster announces itself as a metaphor for death, it can lose the scariness of being a monster in itself.

This is a reoccurring problem in the 2019 film especially as, since we are not given the clear context the books had, the monsters act as punishments for the perceived faults of characters.

For instance, the last story in the film is a weird combination of several different stories with the addition of the stupidly named “jangly man” who pursues one of our main characters, the draft dodger Ramon who is living out of his car.

While the character is running from the monster, it taunts him yelling; “coward!”. Now maybe the monster isn’t giving the most charitable reading of Ramon’s actions but this seems politically to be in very bad faith. When we get to the end of the movie where the happy ending involves Ramon finally enlisting in the army, are we supposed to think that his draft dodging was only motivated by cowardice and not a moral objection to an unjust war? Ramon has his love letter from the Stella the protagonist, so I’m guessing it’s a happy ending. They will reunite after his time served and he will not be blown up while reading love letters as happens to someone in “Apocalypse Now”

Granted, this is a realistic ending as most working-class men couldn't indefinitely evade the draft. But how the film plays this off as a happy ending ultimately makes the whole thing feel a bit toothless. Even though the original books were designed with kids in mind, they always felt dangerous.

While the “Scary Stories” series did have a bit of controversy, it’s also cool that the adults creating them understood the value in kids being scared by something. They knew that the kids would enjoy and retell the stories to try to recapture the feeling.

As much as my generation and older ones tend to attack the younger generations as being overprotected, the truth is that it was people from my generation who didn’t trust kids to enjoy being scared. The 2019 adaptation seems to be afraid of creating something memorably frightening.