And then there’s the Jangly Man - creepy kin to the towering Pale Man from del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), with the added benefit of being able to dismember and reconstruct himself at will.Īll of these beasties are “scary.” Though they’d be much more so if they felt less like franchisable IP and more like fervent expressions of the ills of the eras on which the film aims to comment. A demonic scarecrow, the book series’ own Toe Monster and a festering zit that houses a cluster of spiders also figure into the frights. You can practically see the impassioned pencil shadings in a fleshy ghoul like the Pale Lady, who slowly stalks the red-lit hallways of a hospital before she hugs her victim to death. So how about the monsters? They’re alright - very much in keeping with del Toro’s fresh-from-the-pages-of-my-sketchbook! ethos. Sacrilege! We’ll call the needle-dropping of “Season of the Witch” by Donovan (and its end-credits cover by Lana Del Rey) a draw. Copious demerits to Scary Stories, however, for setting a scene at a drive-in showing Night of the Living Dead (1968) and reformatting that film’s 1.37 aspect ratio to a modern-era friendly 1.78. cast pale lady, scary stories to tell in the dark cast monsters, cast of scary stories to tell in the dark 2 release date, short scary stories to tell. It’s all rather ineffective window dressing (conspicuously straining for political relevance), though give del Toro credit for at least mentioning ‘Nam where Quentin Tarantino cheekily and recklessly effaced it from his own 1960s head trip, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But the world around them is on fire: Nixon posters are defaced with swastikas (nothing contemporaneously relevant about that!), Vietnam is raging and the young Hispanic teen, Ramón Morales (Michael Garza), who joins this little group by chance gets some racist stares and taunts thrown at him by both the the town bully (Austin Abrams) and the local police chief (Gil Bellows).
Introvert teenager/budding writer Stella Nichols (Zoe Margaret Colletti) and her friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) may be enjoying their last high school Halloween together, in addition to awakening Sarah Bellows’ seemingly evil spirit in the local haunted house. Less clever is the decision to set the film in small-town America circa 1968, just before the election of Richard Nixon. As one of our petrified protagonists notes, “The book reads you!”
If you’re the subject of the tale, your doom is assured. They’re the product of a vengeful spirit named Sarah Bellows (Kathleen Pollard), who writes them in blood within a cursed tome. The cleverest conceit is to give the “stories” themselves their own origin.
0 kommentar(er)
