As someone who has adored the horror genre ever since I was
a kid, even weathering the storm when that adoration made me feel like an
outcast, there was always something comforting about discovering that I’d
traveled the same exact road, and made all the same stops, as other kids had during
their formative years. It was a joy to grow older, meet people with the same
interests, and realize that we had shared experiences and interests before ever
knowing each other.
The Scary Stories to
Tell in the Dark trilogy was a huge part of that.
I wish I could remember under what circumstances I first
came to read Alvin Schwartz’s three-book collection based on urban legends,
folklore, and myths. There was never a shortage of books in my house when I was
a kid, as my mother had discovered I was an avid reader, and she was willing to
exploit my love for all things horror (within reason) so long as it kept me
reading. It got to the point where she would have to lovingly but sternly
remind me that those monthly Goosebump
books by R.L. Stine were somewhat expensive, as she tended to bring home a few
at a time, and maybe I should try to read only a few chapters a night to make
them last. (She brought home Deep Trouble
one day, and with a shark on the cover, I read that book in under two hours.
Spoiler alert: it ain’t about sharks.) I’m tempted to believe that my mother
had been the one to bring home one of those Scary
Stories books (for whatever reason, Scary
Stories 3 was the first one I read), but that she’d done so without
actually cracking the book and seeing Stephen Gammell’s illustrations. One
glimpse at “The Haunted House” or “Me-Tie Doughty Walker” and she never would
have left the store with them.
If there ever existed a bible for the horror-loving youth,
it was Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to
Tell in the Dark. Incredibly, horror-loving kids discovered these books on
their own, almost like a rite of passage. It felt like childhood destiny. The
illustrations were tantamount to pornography—as if they’d slipped through the
parental and school library systems on some kind of technicality and were never
meant for kids’ eyes, but something glorious had gone wrong, and those lucky
kids were going to get their fill. Gammell’s illustrations were often so
surreal that sometimes they didn’t seem to complement their stories at all. One
story in particular, “Oh Susanna,” was a retelling of the urban legend about
the college student who comes home to her dorm at night and doesn’t turn on the
light, only to discover the next morning that her roommate had been decapitated.
The illustration that accompanies that story sees an old man in a rocking chair
grasping a leash tied around a flying Lovecraftian monster and being pulled
through the sky of a stormy limbo. How completely inappropriate this illustration
is for that story somehow made both even scarier. Was it a happy accident? Was it
a one-off illustration Gammell had done that had been arbitrarily assigned to
that story? Or was Gammell depicting the instant madness that the story’s
terrified girl was suffering upon the discovery of her dead roommate?
On the cusp of release for the first ever adaptation of the
book series (produced by Guillermo Del Toro and directed by The Autopsy of Jane Doe’s André Øvredal)
comes this low-fi, DIY documentary by Cody Meirick, which explores the history
of the books, the controversies that ensued because of their graphic content,
and their legacy today. Sadly, the doc lacks the two keyest players – author Alvin
Schwartz died of cancer in 1992, and illustrator Stephen Gammell, still alive,
is a bit of a recluse and doesn’t grant interviews. (Nerd brag: I wrote to him
about ten years ago and sent him a copy of the Scary Stories hardcover treasury edition, which he returned with
his signature.)
The doc speaks to Schwartz’s family – his wife, Barbara; son,
Peter; and grandson, Daniel – some of which remains surface level, but some of
which, notably the segments with the son, touch on unexpectedly deep material,
including the strained relationship between himself and his father, and the
regrets he still lives with following his death. Wisely, the doc makes use of seemingly
the only interview Gammell ever gave, which is years old; resurrecting certain excerpts
from that interview not only allows him a presence in the doc, but also puts
the viewer directly within his frame of mind. (Despite how perfectly married
his illustrations are to Schwartz’s stories, the doc heavily suggests that the
two men never actually met.)
The doc somewhat struggles to have a “point,” with the
backbone being the controversies the book series endured over the years, with
one parent in particular (who appears in the doc via archive footage and a newly filmed interview) leading
the charge to get them banned from elementary schools. The book-ban segments
are smartly intermingled with interviews with artists who grew up reading the Scary Stories trilogy and who discuss in
what ways they have informed their work, directly or indirectly. Doing so makes
the case that, had these books been banned successfully, these artists might
never have stumbled upon them, and hence, never become inspired to do their own
creating. The doc also attempts to setup a sort-of squaring off between that
parent who led the ban charge and Schwartz’s son as a knock-down/drag-out
moment of drama, but in reality, they sit down and share their own differing
thoughts on the book, neither of which have changed ever since the initial
controversy, all while remaining ever polite toward each other.
Scary Stories also
struggles to feel consistently engaging, even at a brisk 85 minutes, with too
many scenes of interviewees, or in some really distracting moments, actors
engaging in storytelling skits, reiterating some of the books’ most famous
stories. Meirick uses these bits sometimes to help transition between points,
and including actual text from the stories makes total sense, but a simple
voiceover accompanied by Gammell’s original illustrations would’ve accomplished
the same goal while removing the incidental corniness that results from
watching two young kid actors pretend to be scared by a story about an
exploding spider bite.
Still, Scary Story
mostly works the way it was meant to: it’s a celebration of the black sheep
books that permeated so many of our bookshelves in our youth, examining their
long legacy and the mark they’ve made on so many impressionable minds. With the
world becoming a bigger, warmer, and angrier pile of shit, the nostalgia
machine is operating at an all-time high (the self-serving third season of Stranger Things proves this), and Scary Stories is all part of it. This
exploration into the infamous books is likely as thorough as it could’ve been,
assuming that Schwartz never spoke candidly about them after having written
them—material from which the doc could have mined (as it did with Gammell’s
sole interview). Because of this, the doc can sometimes feel like it lacks potency,
at times feeling more like you’re sitting around having a lightheaded
conversation with friends. It doesn’t ask any tough questions about the dangers
of censorship, and it lacks the kind of drama that even documentaries have
proven to include from time to time. Scary
Stories is more interested in serving as a keepsake—a quasi pre-eulogy for
books that, it would seem, will never go away, no matter how much certain
parents may want them to.
The special features are as follows:
- Director's Commentary
- Over 20 minutes of bonus footage
- Closed Captions
- Scene Selection
- Trailers
Scary Stories is
now on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing, and Scary
Stories to Tell in the Dark hits
theaters in August.
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