It is been a long time since a solid horror picture for kids was released in the mainstream. Thanks to horror legends Guillermo del Toro and Andre Ovredal for taking up Alvin Schwartz’s classic book series, which was drawn by Stephen Gammell. Adapting traditional folklore and urban legends into a feature film requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. The main story is so well-crafted that it brings something fresh and exciting to the table.
Mike Elizalde, Mike Hill, and Norman Cabera’s creative effect team has done some unique work that has left an impression. I am talking about the 2019 film “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” which is classified PG-13 but intended to terrify viewers of all ages. “Scary Stories” has earned its spot in the realm of horror films thanks to the horrific effects and brilliant actors like Troy James, Javier Botet, Kathleen Pollard, and Mark Steger. Let us now look at the film’s most terrifying monsters, which will keep you awake at night.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Released in 2019
The film took us to the Halloween of 1968 in the small town of Mill Valley, where we meet Ramon driving into the town, teenagers Stella Nicholls, who was a die-hard horror fan, Chuck Steinberg, and Auggie Hilderbrandt making plans for Halloween. We also met Tommy Milner and his gang, who loved bullying people and didn’t even spare the scarecrow as he thrashed it to his heart’s content. As Tommy and his team raced off in his car, the camera focused on the scarecrow for a few seconds. Are we getting a hint that this is not the last time we will see him? Let’s find out.
Stella, Chuck, and Auggie threw poop, eggs, and other trash at Tommy’s car and when they retaliated, the trio raced off and hid in Ramon’s car parked in the drive-in theater. From there, the group of four went to explore a local haunted house. The house belonged to the wealthy Bellows family, who were the first family to settle there and establish the paper mill, and eventually, the town was formed. In reality, the ”Bellows House” was a mansion located in southern Ontario, Canada.
Stella narrated the story of Sarah Bellows, the youngest daughter of the Bellows, who had been locked inside her room. There was a myth that Sarah told scary stories to the town’s children, and some of them never reached home and were found poisoned. Eventually, they found the controversial storybook that belonged to Sarah Bellows.
Incidentally, Chucky’s elder sister Ruth was in the car with Tommy, and they followed them to Bellows’ house. Tommy pushed Ruth inside and locked them all inside Sarah’s room. Stella, overwhelmed by Sarah’s book, chanted, ”Sarah Bellows, tell me a story!”, and soon we see a dark shadow rising from the room and opening the locked door.
The group went back home but Ramon went to stay the night at Stella’s house, as Tommy had wrecked his car. As Stella opened the book, suddenly, a news story appeared on a blank page about Harold, the scarecrow at Tommy’s house. As Tommy went to deliver eggs, the scarecrow came alive, and oops! Forget the crow friends; the scarecrow could scare the hell out of many. It stabbed Tommy with a pitchfork that caused Tommy to transform into a scarecrow, as was precisely written in Sarah Bellows’ book. The next day Tommy went missing while Stella and Ramon found that Harold scarecrow wearing the same jacket as Tommy.
Stella returned Sarah’s book, but it went back to Stella’s bookshelf and this time to their horror, a story titled ”The Big Toe” was found written involving Auggie. As Stella and Ramon tried to warn him, a corpse came searching for its missing toe in a stew that Auggie unwittingly ate. Soon Auggie disappeared as the corpse dragged him under the bed.
The terrified friends tried to destroy the book but were unsuccessful. They decided to enquire about Sarah. As Stella, Chucky, and Ramon surfed through records, another story, ”The Red Spot”, appeared in the book, and this time Ruth was the main character. A red spider bite on Ruth’s (what?) swelled up and finally exploded to release thousands of spiders. Ruth was rescued and taken to the hospital, but she was left traumatized.
As the group investigated, they reached the local hospital where they retrieved the recording stating that Sarah was admitted to the hospital by her own brother. He performed electroshock therapy to drive her mad. The Bellows family’s mill had been poisoning the town’s water with Mercury, and Sarah was trying to reveal the truth and save the children who were dying from the poison of the town water. That is why Bellows’ family tortured and isolated her while blaming her entirely for the consequences. As Stella and Ramon listened to the recording, Chucky was attacked by the Pale Lady from his recurring nightmares, as she absorbed him.
Stella and Ramon were arrested for trespassing in the hospital, and in the police station, Police Chief Turner revealed that Ramon was escaping from serving the Vietnam War. Ramon told Stella that after seeing his brother’s body returned to them in pieces, he was petrified to go to war.
Suddenly, Turner’s dog started behaving strangely, and Ramon realized that it was his turn as the next creature would be ‘the Jangly Man’ from the campfire stories that scared him a lot as a child. ‘The Jangly Man’ killed Turner and attempted to kill Ramon. Stella runs to the Bellows’ house to confront Sarah. Troy James, appearing on America’s Got Talent, featured as ‘the Jangly Man’ as he performed the significant backward movement and crawled upside down by himself.
Inside the Bellows’ house, Stella was taken back in time as she became Sarah and started experiencing Sarah’s life exactly how she had led and all that she faced years ago. As Stella was locked inside Sarah’s room by the Bellows family, she finally confronted Sarah’s ghost and promised to write the true story of her innocence, but she needed to stop her rage and hurt other people. Sarah agreed while she and the Jangly Man disappeared.
Stella wrote Sarah’s story as promised, while Ramon accepted his enlistment and left for the war as Stella promised to write him letters every day. As Stella and Ruth returned home in the car with Stella’s father, she vowed to bring back Auggie and Chucky, as she was sure to find a solution in Sarah’s book.
The political backdrop was appropriate, with Nixon posters defaced with swastikas and young, excited boys signing up for the service. The scene-set for Stella’s room was also perfect, as her bedroom wall is plastered with posters and photos of the horror genre. The film has intense scares, fun adventures, and a likable cast.
Most of the monsters displayed brilliant practical work, and the CGI effects were also quite entertaining. The combined impact of the camera work, creepy lighting techniques, wardrobe, and makeup made the film memorable in Hollywood history. The musical theme playing in the movie is ”The Hearse Song”, which is incidentally another story from the books.
All Monsters From The Movie Explored
There is no hiding from Sarah Bellows. She knows what you are scared of, and she writes a story about you and your deepest fear, which soon comes alive and attacks you. The monsters or creatures depicted in the film were ones that each of the characters was scared of. Let us analyze the creepy monsters one by one and compare their original story with the story in the movie.
The Pale Lady
The Pale Lady is the character in the horror story ”The Dream”, about a girl who has a nightmare in which she meets ”The Pale Lady”. The character is based on a story described by Augustus Hare in his autobiography.
Lexi Morgan was haunted by a dream where she saw herself walking up a dark staircase leading to a bedroom. A carpet on the floor was designed with squares that looked like trapdoors. She dreamt on that as she slept. A woman with a pale face, long black hair, and black eyes slipped inside the room silently. She whispered in Lexi’s ears, warning her to run away from that evil place. Lexi woke up screaming and spent a sleepless, horrifying night.
The following day, she decided to visit the town of Dorset instead of Kinston. She looked for a room in a pretty house at the top of the hill. But incidentally, the staircase and the bedroom were exactly the same as she had dreamt.
At first, she thought that everything was a coincidence as she stared at the carpet and the big nails that fastened the windows. The landlady went to get her some tea when there was a knock on the door. When Lexi opened the door, she saw the Pale Lady instead of the landlady. Lexi quickly grabbed her things and ran as fast as she could.
Gammell’s illustration of ‘the Pale Lady’ as a colorless, formless character with thin long hair, black beady eyes, and a long thin smile was enough to send a chill down one’s spine. Still, in reality, the translation of the character to the big screen was apparently less scary than the other monsters depicted in the film.
Sarah Bellows
I don’t know how to describe Sarah Bellow’s character. She had been locked away and tortured by her family, blamed for the crimes she didn’t commit. This turned her into an enraged spirit after she committed suicide.
She was the third child of Delanie and Deodat Bellows, born with albinism, and thus kept locked in a room hidden in the basement. Sarah used to write scary stories and tell them to the children visiting her through the wall of her room. When the children started dying, the Bellows family spread the rumor that Sarah was practicing witchcraft with her housekeeper Sylvie and her daughter Lou Lou on the children visiting her, and she had poisoned the children.
But in reality, the children had died due to mercury poisoning of the town river disposed of by the Bellows’ paper mill, so that their paper mill and their entire family were spared from the liability of the children’s death.
When Sarah refused to take the blame and tried to warn the children about the river pollution, her family admitted her to Pennhurst Asylum by her own brother Dr. Ephraim Bellows. Her cruel brother gave her electric shock treatment and kept her in isolation to make her mentally imbalanced and confess to her misdeeds. Sarah didn’t admit anything but took her own life and became an angry, vengeful spirit.
The rumors Bellows’ family had spread had turned into a myth that whoever entered the Bellows house and said, ”Sarah Bellows, tell me a story” would soon die. Stella was a horror freak. When she got hold of Sarah’s storybook, she uttered the exact words, ”Sarah Bellows, tell me a story,” thus awakening the spirit of Sarah, who was now after all the children who had visited the Bellows house on Halloween night.
After her friends started disappearing mysteriously, Stella realized that the entire Bellows family had disappeared in the same way as their stories had been written in Sarah’s book too. Finally, Stella decided to write Sarah’s true story- her heroic intentions to protect the town children, which finally calmed Sarah’s spirit and all the monsters vanished.
Spiders
Very few people are not scared of spiders, and I am definitely not one of them. One spider is enough horror to deal with, and here you have hundreds of them. The spiders belonged to the story of ”The Red Spot,” and the concerned character was Ruth. After Ruth returned from the Bellows house she noticed one red spot on her cheek, which she concluded was from a spider bite. The original story related to this one is very similar, as the name of both the main characters is Ruth.
In the original story, while Ruth was sleeping, a spider crawled on her cheek and a red spot appeared the next day. In the film, cobwebs stuck onto Ruth as she was pushed into Sarah’s room. Probably that was when she was bit by the spider. The next day, she found a red spot on her cheek. In both the stories, the red spot grew into a red boil.
In this film, we saw that a strand of black hair popped out of the boil, but alas, that was not hair! That was the leg of a spider. As soon as Ruth pulled it, the boil burst, and hundreds of baby spiders crawled out of the boil. The spiders didn’t kill Ruth but scarred her psychologically.
The Toe Ghoul
This is one of the grotesque stories from Schwartz’s collection titled, ”The Big Toe”. A young boy finds a severed toe in the garden, which he showed his father. Imagine the horror factor when the father casually suggests that they have it for supper. In the film, the suspense starts when we see Auggie talking with his mother, intending to eat the soup that had been kept in the refrigerator.
His mother kept on saying that no soup had been prepared that day, but Auggie was not ready to listen. Over the walkie-talkie, Stella and Ramon kept shouting, asking Auggie not to eat anything, but he wouldn’t listen. His friends knew that there was a toe floating in the soup, the audience also knew, but Auggie was totally unaware.
When he finally realized, he started vomiting. But more than disgusted, he was terrified as the gruesome corpse came looking for his toe. Auggie tried to hide from ‘the Toe Ghoul’, but finally, the monster dragged him under the bed as both of them disappeared. ‘The hiding under the bed’ was the usual nail-biting sequence, putting the audience at the edges of their seats.
Harold The Scarecrow
There has been a comparison between ‘Harold the scarecrow’ and ‘the Jangly Man’. Though the majority thought that the Jangly man had a higher horror factor, I personally felt that Harold with his empty belly and cockroach-infested structure was scarier than the Jangly man.
In the original story, Harold was made out of sacs stuffed with straw by two farmers, Thomas and Alfred, who had named him after another farmer they hated. They bullied the scarecrow in the same way Tommy used to bully Harold. One day, Harold came to life in front of Thomas and Alfred, climbed up the roof, and started stomping on it. Panic-stricken, Thomas and Alfred left with their cows, but when Thomas returned to get their milking stools, Harold flayed Thomas alive.
In the film, Harold was the scarecrow in Tommy’s crop field subjected to repeated ridicule and thrashing by Tommy. But after Tommy’s story was written in Sarah’s book, Harold became alive here too and stabbed him with a pitchfork. Instead of blood, there was hay everywhere as he even vomited hay, keeping in mind that this is a PG-13 cinema. Thus, Tommy had been converted into a scarecrow, hanging in the same place as Harold had been, and Harold disappeared.
The Jangly Man
The Jangly Man is probably the creepiest Monster in the film, who can disassemble and reassemble as desired. His backstory goes as follows. A long time back, there lived an old woman all by herself. One night she felt very lonely and wished for some company. Her desire was fulfilled as two feet came down the chimney.
Then appeared two arms, legs, head, and a body, which reassembled into the Jangly Man, who started dancing around the room faster and faster until he stopped and looked into the woman’s eyes. When the woman asked in a shivering voice why he had come, he replied, ” I come for you!”
In the film, too, the Jangly Man appeared from the chimney, but here his head came first and said, ”I tie dough-ty walker,” which refers to another story from the series. The Monster reassembled itself and snapped the cop’s neck and then proceeded to kill Ramon, who was his main target. Del Toro said that the Jangly man was supposed to be Ramon’s dead brother returning from Vietnam, and the creature was going to have eight limbs combining two bodies. But that would have required too much digital work. Instead, some interesting practical work and James’s ability to stretch gave Jangly Man the desired look.
Is There Going to be Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 2?
Paramount and Entertainment One have made an official announcement that a sequel to the 2019 movie, ”Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” is being made by almost the same team that had started it. Del Toro is crafting the story once again, while Dan and Kevin Hageman have written the screenplay. Norwegian director Andre Ovredal is also returning as the director.
Although the announcement confirmed the return of the creative team, nothing has been announced about the actors of the movie. The ending of the last film had implied that Stella would surely find a way to get back her best friends and so for the film’s sake it would be best if all the actors reprised their roles to maintain the continuity. There is also a possibility that none of the actors will come back, and there would be a time jump, just the way it happened in ”IT Chapter 2”.
It is unlikely that Sarah Bellows’ character will be involved in the film as it was rounded up quite nicely in the previous film. But the main question that follows is where are Auggie, Chucky, and Tommy! So, it is probable that Stella, Ruth, and Stella’s father would search for a way to rescue them. The fans are eagerly waiting for Auggie and Chucky’s return.