At one point or another, most of us are tempted to revisit the haunts of our younger days. And more often than not, if we cave, a funny thing happens. The places and feelings and memories we return to seem to have—shriveled. The vibrant colors at the lake are more muted than you remember. Those elementary school hallways you pop in to visit look so much narrower now—and were the ceilings always that low? That roller coaster of your teen summers seems so much less intimidating, the heights less extreme. I guess in some ways, this is how it all works—we live, we grow, we change. So perhaps I should have expected that the 2019 film adaptation of the series of books by Alvin Schwartz that terrified me as a child was going to disappoint. But I might have been more willing to accept that had Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark not tried to gild Schwartz’s lily.
The film is set in 1968, on the eve of the Helter Skelter of ‘69, and fittingly, we 
meet a group of young teens soaking up their last Halloween of high school in small-town-Pennsylvania. They befriend a young wanderer and all end up visiting a local haunted house together, where they find a book of scary stories that, legend has it, was written by a woman who was locked up in the selfsame house. What’s even more disturbing than the stories themselves is that they start to come to life, and the teens are determined to find out how to stop these real-life nightmares before it’s too late.
When I began tracking reports of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the master of memorable monsters, the nobleman of nostalgic nightmares, Guillermo del Toro himself, was at the helm of the film. Years later, he is now 
listed among a handful of screenwriters and a half-dozen producers of the film, and unfortunately, I think his diminished participation is reflected in the results.
As much as I want to empathize with the film’s characters and follow the larger frame of its plot, I simply cannot see the majestic pine tree through all that tinsel. The storyline requires you to track at least three different timelines nested within one another (and not in an impressive Dunkirk kind of way), empathize with a deep bench of characters who have a handful of lines each or are introduced in the final fifth of the film, and be terrified by monsters from stories that haven’t even been explained.
But perhaps what’s most egregious is that all this extra stuff only leaves time for a handful of Schwartz’ tales, the filmmakers 
don’t even pick the best ones, and they don’t do proper justice to the ones picked. Yes, some of the scares are deeply disturbing and effective, but truthfully, you can make anyone jump with loud music and high-quality CGI that mimics Stephen Gammell’s deeply eerie illustrations. Look, in order to truly capture the terror of Schwartz’s stories, you absolutely must include the context that allows for that twist at the end of the narrative arc. By leaving out that elemental “and all along…” punch of each story, the film excludes what makes these tales truly worth sharing around a campfire.
But alas, buried under a CVS-receipt-length list of producers and writers, and struggling to capture the last gasps of success of recent throwbacks like Stranger Things and It (2017), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ends up muddling the magic of some truly terrifying, disturbingly scary stories.
And so in the end, if we know we will inevitably be let down when we revisit the past—when we crack open that door to our kindergarten classroom, stop by that high diving board at the neighborhood pool, or see that movie bringing to life the stories that gave us nightmares as a kid—why on earth do we do it? Maybe because we want to jog our memory and even for a brief, fleeting moment, relive the past. Maybe because we truly forget how the mind works and we expect everything to be just as we remember it.
Or maybe, just maybe, we do it because we know full well that with time, things always seem different. Maybe what was once a boulder is now a pebble. Maybe what once scared us looks quite mundane when set against the backdrop of the real-life challenges we’ve tackled since. And maybe, just maybe, we feel all the stronger for it. Whatever the reason, we are always drawn back, and like a moth to a flame, the disappointment of this film has me digging out the OG paperback pages of my childhood nightmares.
SpecialK Verdict: If you’re a child of the 80s and 90s and have a soft spot—albeit a dark one—for Alvin Schwartz’s scary stories, skip this film and stick to the original books instead. Human nature says you probably won’t listen to me, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark opens everywhere Friday, August 9.
Never miss a review — sign up for email updates to the right, follow us on Twitter, or like The Parsing Haus on Facebook!