![]() The misfit heroes’ supernatural travails begin after they provoke a bully from the in-crowd. The moviemakers concoct a small-town high-school Halloween movie about geeks and freaks in mythical Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, in 1968. They try to mirror Schwartz’s “OOOOOOOOOOOOH”s and “AAAAAAAAAAAAH”s with a secession of “Gotcha!” moments, and at least half the time, they succeed. They fashion their version of ’80s Amblin films about kids facing outlandish perils, such as, at the low end, The Goonies, and, at the high end, Gremlins. ![]() To recreate, in cinematic terms, the visceral impact of Schwartz’s thrice-told tales, the filmmakers embed them in their own movie-mad youths. But del Toro’s efforts are central to what he and Norwegian director André Øvredal and American screenwriters Dan and Kevin Hageman try to pull off here. The credits list del Toro as producer and co-writer of “the original story” (along with Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan), which might seem strange for a film directly based on Schwartz’s stories. They include bleak and often scary-funny campfire tales like “Harold,” about a scarecrow who comes to life open-ended horror fragments like “The Big Toe,” about what happens after a boy plucks a big toe from the family garden-it’s rooted to something underneath the topsoil-and his mom cooks it, his father carves it, and they all eat it and grotesque fantasies like “Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker,” about a bloody talking head that drops into a fireplace-the kind of story kids tell at sleepovers before pouncing on each other and screaming (as Schwartz suggests) “AAAAAAAAAAAAH!” Then there are mini-fables that provoke primal fears, like “The Red Spot,” in which a person unknowingly incubates spider eggs under her skin, and literal nightmares like “The Dream House,” about an artist who dreams that a pallid specter rouses her from sleep, in a room with nailed-shut windows, and murmurs, “This is an evil place. The books behind Guillermo del Toro’s new production, Alvin Schwartz’s compulsively readable Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, collect folkloric scraps and urban myths. All images from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |