Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
Horror movies that can be watched by the younger crowd are tough genre. You have to walk a very fine line between being too scary and not being scary enough. There has to be something actually at stake in the story, which means that we’re going to have to probably have some people killed, but you also don’t want it to be too gory. You want scares, but not specifically nightmares. It should be fun, but not specifically funny. A movie like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark attempts to walk that fine line, giving us a series of mini stories as part of an overarching tale that seems to hit right about at the level of a good campfire tale.
The movie takes place on and after Halloween in 1968 in a small town in Pennsylvania. Like lots of small towns, this one has a past history that is unsavory in parts and has a founding family with dark secrets. In this case, the founding family was the Bellows, and daughter Sarah Bellows has a number of unsavory legends surrounding her, most dealing with child murder. On this Halloween, a group of nerdy kids including Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), August (Gabriel Rush), and Chuck (Austin Zajar) attempt to get back at their bully, Tommy (Austin Abrams). It happens that their bully is on a date with Chuck’s sister, Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn).
