Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

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cdnchris
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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#2 Post by cdnchris » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:15 pm

I told my wife they were adapting that and she gave me a blank look. I reminded her by showing her a pic of the book cover and then she realized what it was.

I somewhat remeber the stories but I think it was more the art that gave me nightmares. It would be great if they could somehow incorporate that imagery (successfully.)

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#3 Post by Jeff » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:20 pm

It's taken me 30 years to try to forget those images!

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#4 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:25 pm

Yeah, that art was pretty horrifying. A bit surprising for a children's book.

The story I remember the most was some girl that had a zit or blemish that kept growing and growing until spiders popped out. I always thought it was hilarious, but my sisters thought it was terrifying.

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#5 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:26 pm

The most recent edition of the book doesn't even feature Stephen Gammell's original artwork. If the publishers can't be faithful to what made it such a cultural touchstone for so many children, I can't imagine Hollywood would either.


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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#7 Post by cdnchris » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:38 pm

Was the image that murdoch said he had to skip the one with the woman's face melting? (The link appears broken.) I had to skip that one.

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#8 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:41 pm

It was this:

Image

EDIT: And don't click the black box, Chris
SpoilerShow
Image

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#9 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:47 pm

More importantly, did anyone ever confirm if Domino was behind the Goosebumps blog?

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#10 Post by Murdoch » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:50 pm

Well my childhood nightmares have all come rushing back to me.

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#11 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:56 pm

Image

Well, my work is done here

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#12 Post by Dylan » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:59 pm

This is the sort of project Joe Dante ought to helm. I still find it odd how all of the Scary Stories books were stocked at my elementary school library, and how multiple copies of these books could be found around the school in various classrooms. I'll never forget the - still rather indescribable - emotions I'd get from leafing through these books and being completely unable to tear my eyes away from certain illustrations. Looking at a few of the illustrations again, they still possess a great deal of power. Every detail - fingers, hair, clothes, etc. - has a kind of "rotten flesh" finish, as if all of the details are dripping or bleeding. It's a very "inked in flesh/blood" look - horribly nightmarish and unique, not to mention mesmerizing in the most wonderful, macabre way.

By the way, am I wrong or was John Landis attached to a Scary Stories movie sometime in the nineties? I remember reading that in Fangoria or Cinefantastique but can't find anything about it online. That said, I can't remember if it was tied to the books or if it was just the title of a separate project.
Last edited by Dylan on Fri Dec 06, 2013 1:34 am, edited 4 times in total.

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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#13 Post by cdnchris » Fri Dec 06, 2013 12:00 am

And of course I click on it. How could I not?

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (TBA, 201X)

#14 Post by MoonlitKnight » Sun Dec 08, 2013 8:52 pm

"Harold" from the third book was always my favorite story.



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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#17 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Aug 21, 2018 4:49 pm

Del Toro has stated via his Twitter account that this starts shooting in Toronto in a few days.

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#18 Post by domino harvey » Sat Mar 30, 2019 3:56 am

Trailer— invoking Yakov Smirnoff to fully embrace the nostalgia here, great choice. Why would anyone bother to adapt this series as anything but an anthology film?

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#19 Post by BigMack3000 » Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:41 pm

Did two trailers use the same rendition of "Over the Rainbow" in the same weekend?

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#20 Post by Big Ben » Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:49 pm

These were pretty big when I was a kid. I imagine if you wanted to traumatize your kids it would be worth a watch with them.

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#21 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Mar 30, 2019 3:32 pm

BigMack3000 wrote:
Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:41 pm
Did two trailers use the same rendition of "Over the Rainbow" in the same weekend?
I'm just waiting for the dark and moody single piano key rendition of "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" in a trailer, as the voiceover announcer intones "She decided to wear the yellow bikini today...which was only the first mistake of many in a night of unrelenting terror!"

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#22 Post by knives » Sat Jan 04, 2020 8:58 pm

I kind of unabashedly loved this beyond all good reason. I can imagine the producers wanted this to be the next Stranger Things, but Øvredal and his team thankfully have no desire to fulfill that. Instead of Goosebumps and Spielberg the stylistic source here seems to be American Graffiti and Roger Corman. That allows it to get into a much more bizarre and violent place then I could have imagined (the first murder is honestly one of the grossest things I've seen in a mainstream film). It also uses the style of the illustrations in a gut curling way that accurately captures the feeling of seeing those rotting corpses. Probably the best thing is a result of it being made by a bunch of non-Americans who clearly are students of the country's pop culture. The movie, just to give a sense of things starts off with a poster of Nixon where the X is a swastika. It pretty nakedly deals with the idea of Americana in a way you wouldn't expect. As an adaptation of folk tales I'm impressed with how the movie utilizes how we tell stories to deal with our own identity. In this way there's a lot of overlap with Candyman though Øvredal looks at folktales as a method of hiding the truth rather than as catharsis.


Also they pseudo adapted my favorite/ gave me the most nightmares story so that makes me happy.

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#23 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Apr 23, 2022 4:14 am

Not being familiar with the source material I was interested by just how much the film seemed in the tradition of the Silent Hill (the historical abuse that takes place in a community and with the consent of the family; and especially in that moment of two characters inhabiting different temporal versions of the same location at the end), One Missed Call and Ring films. This really feels like a J-horror film mixed with the concerns of the 60s and 70s US horror scene (and EC comics blackly comic barbed social commentary), filtered through a modern aesthetic that is indebted to Stranger Things and the recent It films.

As with many of the horror films of the late 1960s and 1970s (basically up to the point where actual Vietnam war films started being produced) this seems most understandable as a (really thinly veiled!) Vietnam allegory and that specific year of 1968 seems very well chosen to set the action in because that was the period when horror changed from the Universal monsters (i.e. the ones that the main character has all over her bedroom) to the more visceral and in your face horrors that saw the world as a bleak slaughterhouse with no escape that seemed to be responding to the charnal house times (i.e. films like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dead of Night, Carrie, the whole slasher film genre and Night of the Living Dead. 1968 is also the year of Peter Bogdanovich's Targets which features its own show down at a drive-in theatre as old school horror faces off against a new form of random carnage. Although I did think the main couple of characters are too suspiciously immediately hip to the important cultural value of Night of the Living Dead as soon as it has been released, but I can let that go as a bit of filmic licence I suppose! I also really like the use of the cover of the Donovan Season of the Witch tune for the opening and end credits, which of course George A. Romero used in his film of the same name). The true scary story rumbling away in the background of this film is the one about institutional behaviours that destroyed an entire generation and left the rest of the survivors in the culture dealing with trauma.

It may be reading too much into it, but the film opens with the school bully character having excitedly signed up for his tour of duty upon graduation from school, and making plans to have a final Halloween night of terrorising the students before shipping out. And it may be telling that as each of the rest of the characters ‘come of age’, or rather have their name written down in the book, they get dragged off into a different world, never to be seen again. That’s just the boys of course, whilst the girl instead gets so traumatised by the loss of her boyfriend and brother that she has her school play ruined and ends up in a mental asylum. The scary stories seem metaphorical for certain issues related to the war: the insurgency from the oppressed figures out in the fields turning against the American wandering through their territory without respect; the over protective and literally smothering mother figure; the figures who have been mutilated and are looking for their lost body parts or who literally can dismember themselves and put their body back together in a new configuration (maybe a comment on the war machine metaphor of the ‘meat grinder’ chewing up bodies!); and in the spider pimple scene the idea that the horror is inside of you, maybe even created by you, and there is nowhere to run or retreat to in order to escape from the damage that has been done.

This is all happening whilst the adult characters (or the school bully and the Sheriff, who get equated together in getting the nastiest deaths) seem more preoccupied by the practical concerns represented by the presence of the Hispanic draft dodger Ramon (interesting that Stella puts him up in her basement after his car is destroyed, similar to the way Sarah Bellows in the past was ‘hidden away’ from sight. Although in Ramon’s case it is only for a night!) than any obviously fictional scary story.

Eventually the main character Stella herself unwittingly ‘signs up’ everyone around her for their own inevitable meeting with death, and has to cope with the knowledge that she has marshalled a squad into arbitrary decimation. We get a ‘somewhat’ happy ending of the main character saying that the boys may still be salvageable from the other world, if she can just read the book correctly, but to me this plays like delusion (or PTSD?) that if we can just study hard enough the mistakes of the past that we can bring the dead back to life and make everything OK again (a subtle allusion to The Monkey's Paw story?). Really whilst there is a relatively uplifting coda to the film I cannot see it as anything more than naive at best, especially in the deeply ironic way that Stella saves the on the run from the draft Ramon from his own literalisation of his childhood fears only to see him off on the Army bus to Vietnam to face a whole new set of terrors which he most likely will never return from, with Stella promising to write “every day” to him, which looks set to become the new set of papers a lonely girl is writing to someone who will never reply until their unrequited yearning may curdle into ramped up spiritual anger directed at anyone who might cross their path.

I am not entirely sure who this film is aimed at. People who liked the It films or Stranger Things generally I would guess, though this period setting feels much more necessary and specific than in those other works (similar to the way that the historical context for Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backdone ends up being more relevant to the terror than the front and centre obvious monsters). Maybe nostalgic baby boomers who are still troubled by Vietnam and its legacy. Or people who grew up with the stories. It certainly appeals to me from a different direction as being a fun riff on 90s Japanese horror tropes, perhaps the best attempt that a US film has made at replicating the investigative structure of something like Ring or One Missed Call 2 (which this is structurally really close to, especially in the final act). Not being familiar with the source material I would be curious as to whether that was just a collection of scary stories for children or had the Vietnam allegory stuff present already, or whether that was a structure added by the filmmakers.

Anyway the allegory is not exactly subtle, with the regular appearances in the background of Richard Nixon on the television as he comes relentlessly and inescapably closer and closer to becoming President and ramping up the carnage to new heights. Really he is the very modern threat that the youths so obsessed with classic Universal monster-style witches, monsters and supernatural ghouls are entirely missing right in front of them, and remain oblivious to even at the very end. The even bigger overarching scary story is the deceptively mundane, media santised one playing out in direct sunlight and through the television screens.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Mar 10, 2023 7:11 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#24 Post by domino harvey » Sat Apr 23, 2022 9:14 am

I haven’t seen this yet and your write up makes it sound like a big mess, but I am not surprised to hear that you don’t recognize any of these stories from across the pond, as the source material is primarily modern North American folklore retold for younger audiences (a kind of kids primer of the great work Jan Harold Brunvand does in the urban legend field, with more of a focus on supernatural lore). So no, no real Vietnam parallels at all, though some stories of this ilk are inspired by trends and fears of the time (such as some of the Venn diagram overlaps between Schwartz and Brunvand like “the Cat in the Shopping Bag” and “the Man in the Middle”, which I doubt made it into the movie!)

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Re: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

#25 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Apr 23, 2022 9:40 am

That "Man in the Middle" story makes me think of the Irving August scene from The Seventh Victim! But yes it does not turn up in the film.

I don't think Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is as much of a mess as I may be making it out to be as it is a relatively straightforward kids vs monsters film of the 1980s style popularised by Joe Dante (as noted above) and things like The Monster Squad or the best of that subgenre The Gate (and I certainly prefer it to the updated out of their time period, and therefore losing their entire reason for being, recent It films), but it is a strange mash up of influences. There's definitely a Guillermo del Toro element of love for fantastical creatures there, and a period setting which seems incredibly pointed both for what it means to the history of the horror genre and for the society as a whole. But structurally it has the investigative structure of the Japanese horror films (and US remakes) from Ring onwards combined with a knowingly nostalgic aesthetic of Stranger Things and It. So it is being at least four different types of horror film simultaneously seemingly in order to provide a structure to the individual standalone original stories that I was unfamiliar with!

Though it seemed to work well enough to get me thinking about all the other things going on under the surface of the relatively straightforward tales (it is as if they are taking simple and darkly ironic moral punchline short stories and trying to fit them into a cozy structure of kids having an adventure to try and suggest that things are not entirely bleak. But then that surrounding structure itself reveals itself to be the most nihilistically inescapably bleak of all, so dark that even the characters themselves never figure out the new horrors they are in for. Vietnam is just being treated as your 'generic overseas war' here by the unsavvy characters, equivalent to the approach to the Korean War before and Iraq and Afghanistan decades later, rather than as the enormously important turning point of American cultural thinking that the film is seemingly suggesting that only horror movies understood at the time). However I don't know how it would play to those who have a deep connection to the source material.

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