Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Reviews
June 10, 2021
Scary Stories is the perfect gateway horror film to fire up youthful imaginations, yet disturbing enough to scratch even the most seasoned genre buff's itch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
April 22, 2021
"Not ghosts but human beings," reads a slogan for International Albinism Awareness Day, so it's ironic that the sole person with albinism in Scary Stories shows up as a ghost.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
January 31, 2021
During one of the longer sleuthing scenes I wondered, "When is the pacing building suspense and when is it building tedium?"
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
November 21, 2020
While only rated PG-13, this Guillermo del Toro produced horror film delivers more than its fair share of thrills, turning the popular YA book series into a pseudo-anthology film that avoids the trap of being inconsistent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.0/4.0
October 26, 2020
Tone, flow and chemistry... those are the three things that didn't really mesh.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
September 24, 2020
It does it job at being a good horror flick for a night out of the house, but it still isn't as bold as it probably could've been.
August 16, 2020
A nasty slice of PG-13 horror that shows a family-friendly feel doesn't mean the boundaries of terror can't be pushed and twisted with grotesque glee.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
July 24, 2020
A PG-13 adaptation that delivers intermittent frights amid plenty of campy nostalgia as it tries to stitch together unrelated spooky stories with mixed results. One can't help but think that it would have been better as an episodic TV series.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
July 8, 2020
I liked Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I just wish I loved it.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
June 30, 2020
A very good Goosebumps movie, not a very good Scary Stories movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
June 27, 2020
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is true to its name ... genuinely creepy, with an incredible sense of atmosphere.
February 20, 2020
Format-wise, the film may have benefited from being a more straightforward anthology of shorts based on the stories, which were effective because they were so brutally concise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
January 6, 2020
These and other spooky specters are memorably incarnated, to be sure. But I'm pretty easy to scare, and I can't say I found the movie, directed by Norway's Andre Ovredal of 2010's excellent Trollhunter, all that scary.
December 6, 2019
Scary Stories struggles to get around to making whatever additional point it had, instead using a wealth of in-between scenes to justify its feature-length format.
November 21, 2019
Good bones are what keep Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark upright.
November 12, 2019
The tension builds, the special effects are gruesome, and most of all the film is fun for both young and old moviegoers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
November 12, 2019
Blame the high expectations, but this adaptation feels bland and vague. Trailers should never be better than the actual movie. In this case they were. [Full review in Spanish].
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
October 31, 2019
The plot is fun, the stories are creepy, and I enjoyed every minute of it. But just as is often true, the books were better than the movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
October 21, 2019
By couching all of the original shorts in the over-arching small-town kids' story, this adaptation short-shrifts the shorts. There's not enough of them here, and that makes them feel sketchy.
October 13, 2019
If you're thinking this seems to be a list of horror clichés and stereotypes, that's not an uncharitable suspicion. The filmmakers' skill rests in the way these stereotypes are reanimated in a narrative that contains a surprising number of layers.
