It's around the presidential election in an American cave in 1968. Richard Nixon smiles from election posters, young men come home from Vietnam in coffins, and in high school, a click of baseball kills a terror by systematically terrorizing all younger thugs. Stella,
Auggie and Chuck are a small nerd gang trying to navigate between melancholy parents, tyrannical bullies, and the teenage longing away.
After thoroughly avenging their tormentors' spirits during the Halloween night, the little gang flees into a huge, boomed crow castle. When it began, in the 19th century, the big potatoes lived there with their family. The daughter Sarah was apparently awkward so she locked her in the basement alone. According to legend, she made the time go by scaring the children of the area with ghost stories that she told through the basement wall.
After some initial scare hiccup scenes in the Gothic Destiny House, it is clear that Sarah is not done with her stories and that she continues to be scared, and avenged, from the other side. One by one in the gang, they become prisoners in their worst nightmares and devoured by the surface of the earth.
As a horror film, it is astounding, it makes no claims to, for example, Jordan Peel's smart horror comments of the time, or Ari Aster's rendition of folklore and psychotic motherhood. Here are the historical injustices that haunt, time and Nixon's policy is a fund that is well suited to tell about vulnerability and change. However, the gun refusal Ramón who joins the gang is called "wetback", provides a powerful echo of contemporary US border policy.
The director is the Norwegian André Øvredal who among other things made the sensationally funny Troll hunter, and certainly you expect a creative meeting between two people who like monsters, fairy tales and humor. Del Toro's playfully designed wonder (I will never forget it with the eyes in the palms of the Pan Labyrinth) and the pathos for the odd and outcast, meet a stably directed group of young people who are gnawing at each other both tenderly and entertainingly. There are plenty of horror clichés, but they are handled with a love for the genre and Øvredal steer calmly between screaming blondes and ghosts in the nightmare.
Scary stories to tell in the dark are neither innovative nor surprising. But beautifully filmed and made with incredibly good humor.