Movie Reviews for Writers: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

I’ve been wanting to watch this one for a while because I remember reading the books when my kids were smaller and enjoying them. They were the perfect blend of “child-safe” and “creepy as hell” that gave them and me an awesome connecting point. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was how much this movie actually talked about telling stories. 

Consider it a pleasant surprise on my part. 

The basics: Stella joins her friend Augie and Chuck to get a little Halloween prank revenge on a school bully and end up in a haunted house. Intrigued by the stories of Sara Bellows telling tales through the wall to kids, most of whom ended up missing, Stella takes the book of stories from the house and faster than you can say “I told you not you,” brand new stories start to appear and Stella’s friends begin to disappear while living out those tales. 

Not all lessons about telling stories and writing from this film are equal, however. For starters, when Ramon discovers Stella’s journal of her own fiction, he asks her about it, then quickly adds that “If you’re serious about being a writer, it’s not going to happen here. You have to go to the city.”

Sadly, this lie still permeates the publishing community, this idea that it takes an urban setting to be a writer, that you have to live close to the publishers themselves. That may or may not be true in the screenplay business (I don’t know) but it certainly isn’t for the prose fiction world anymore. 

The digital revolution has all but negated the pro/con discussions between urban/rural locations for writers. Email and teleconferencing have alleviated the need for proximity to publishers. 

Not only that, thanks to the wonder of self-publishing or a scattering of indie and mid-list presses all over the place, a grandmother in the middle of Kansas has the same access to getting a book published as a stereotype living in poverty in a loft in New York. 

But let’s move on to the lessons this creepy movie gets right. 

First, stories are very, very powerful. And they are powerful in many ways. 

At the beginning of the movie, Stella narrates a line that becomes a sort of mantra and theme during the film.

“Stories hurt. Stories heal.”

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