Scary Stories is much more than a movie about naive but adventurous teenagers exploring a haunted house In their hometown. It re-creates an intense atmosphere of place and time; the Rust Belt, 1968. Major changes coming, though just a few people in town notice them yet. Some heavy emotional themes; you watch them slowly revealed one by one.
Small-town people forced to change. Sharp curves in the road ahead. Changes that will make it hard just staying on the road. Teenagers on the edge of a cliff. Hardly suspecting they’d have to decide which way to turn. But hard decisions they need to make; real soon.
A presidential election (Nixon-Humphrey) that will slowly but surely end in sorrow. A deserted house full of dirty secrets. Kids barely out of childhood…poised on the edge of a cliff.
A warning though; most of the reviews I read (after writing this) were only slightly better than average. People born after the baby-boomer generation did not seem affected by it with the same impact.. The movies’s second half throws in some (partly) unexplained creatures and drags a little.
But you get a sense of deep emotional changes in the narrator, Stella, and in her friends starting with a voice-over which the movie will deliver on; “Stories can leave deep scars. This I learned.”
Whoever she learned from was dead right.
“The last autumn of my childhood, ” Stella goes on. The movie shows you how that autumn changed her .
Donovan on the radio; Season of the Witch. Its sinister, overpowering organ. We would hear a similar organ theme a few years later; even more ominous, more threatening: Led Zeppelin, Your Time is Gonna Come. A tough, mean kid telling two friends he just enlisted in the military. They get ready to go out and kick some ass. After all it’s Halloween night.
Stella alone in her bedroom. Its walls full of horror movie posters. An aspiring writer, a good soul. Her two best friends, Auggie and Chuck finally persuade her to hang out. Ramon, a stranger in town, alone in his car. He watches her ride her bike.
Auggie and Chuck have a longstanding grudge against the tough kids. The hoods chase them into a drive-in. Night of the Living Dead. One more indication of big changes to come in our country. (Watch it now, then try to imagine watching it in1968). The tough kids chase them into the town’s only truly haunted house, the Bellows place. But you’renot watching a Scooby-doo episode.
Inside the house; no big surprises. The one exception; a dusty old book that Stella finds and takes home. Only a quick flash of the ugly reality still to emerge.
Kids in the town start to die. Stella and Ramon read stories in the book. No mistaking the connection. They try to burn the book; it won’t burn. The book is a pandora’s box. No magic word, amulets, silver bullets to use against it. The law enforcement they once had faith in— only makes things worse.
Scarecrow With Unexplained Powers
Even baby boomers who survived the Vietnam war/student protests/Watergate/Nixon Impeachment era may not sense the symbolism the book reflects. How we got here…and what the fuck do we do about it.
Stella and her friends stare at the open book as it writes its own new stories and their town slowly begins to die. Their search for answers takes them
into a corrupt, savage mental hospital then to a jail without mercy. Then back to the Bellows house. As she feared she would, Stella finds a monster…one that their own family de-humanized. Only one hope for a girl (not yet out of high school): Face the monster. Explain. That the people who died so far were innocent, that they never hurt the monster.