The shadow of the Bellows family has loomed large in the small town of Mill Valley for generations. It’s in a mansion that young Sarah Bellows turns her tortured life and horrible secrets into a series of scary stories. These terrifying tales soon have a way of becoming all too real for a group of unsuspecting teens who stumble upon Sarah’s spooky home.
From producer Guillermo del Toro and director André Øvredal comes “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” sort of a series of vignettes strung together that follows the exploits of several teens during the 1968 presidential election. The tale, billed as a horror flick, supplies an allegory for our time obviously intended by the filmmakers. Yet, and unfortunately, most audiences will almost certainly fail to appreciate the deeper meaning of this parable.
The Bellows family home, now a haunted house in the small town of Mill Valley, provides a suitable setting for this scary story. Before it was abandoned many years previous, the prosperous family inhabited the sprawling residence as owners of a paper mill that provided much of the town’s employment. More ominously, however, the family harbored darks secrets, revealed piece by piece in the course of this narrative.
What begins as a coming of age yarn quickly migrates into a spooky mystery. On a Halloween night, our protagonists sneak into the decrepit mansion. As they explore, they recount their own versions of the tragic death of Sarah Bellows (Kathleen Pollard) and her tormented life. Needing a scapegoat, the wealthy family blames a black servant named Lou Lou (Lorraine Toussaint), the sole survivor decades later.
Zoe Margaret Colletti stars as Stella Nicholls who indicates early on in a voice-over that stories can hurt, and stories can heal. In the haunted mansion, Stella finds a book containing Sarah’s depictions of the last moments of each family member that mistreated her. Eerily, after Stella takes the book home, new stories appear – written in blood before her very eyes – on the pages, portending the death of each of her friends. As with such classics as “The Abominable Dr. Phibes,” part of the fun revolves around how the characters meet his or her unsavory end in a kind of karmic retribution for relatively minor transgressions.
Michael Garza plays Ramón Morales, Stella’s budding love interest. The circle of friends includes Gabriel Rush as Auggie Hilderbrandt, Austin Zajur as Chuck Steinberg, and Natalie Ganzhorn as Ruth Steinberg. The town bad boy is Austin Abrams as Tommy. Dean Norris plays the troubled father of Stella, Roy Nicholls. And the obligatory town cop is Gil Bellows as Chief Turner.
In and of itself, the plot device merely acts as window dressing to elaborate larger issues – the backdrop of the 1968 election, the protracted Vietnam conflict, and its attendant and unpopular draft. With an all-volunteer military in place today, many young people likely have forgotten or never knew how conscription sent over 50,000 young men to their death in far east Asia. Actual television images of the time are liberally sprinkled throughout, such as President Johnson calling on the American people to support the “noble” purpose of the Vietnam War. Yet as a nation, it is as if we have learned nothing from the past. The same mistakes keep getting made, with the Iraq war but among the more recent examples. One can legitimately wonder if a futile, needless and costly war with Iran lurks in the offing for America?
Other telling images include George Wallace, an openly racist third-party presidential candidate who garnered nearly 14 percent of the popular vote and won all the electoral votes in five states in the Deep South. In yet another instance, the dark secret of the paper mill that Sarah discovers should remind us that acts once considered acceptable are now widely understood to be morally reprehensible.
To its credit, the storyline never fails to keep the audience engaged, even as the subliminal context seeps out from the background or emerges in the dialog. The social commentary infuses nearly every scene. What now seems like a million years ago bears a surprising resonance to today’s political landscape, such as overt bigotry against Latinos.
Fans will appreciate the way the stage is set for one or more sequels. “Scary Stories” provides more than enough thrills and chills for its intended audience, and perhaps just as many for older folks. Between the metaphors, mystery, and mayhem, the film serves up a veritable feast of tasty morsels.
In Theaters Friday, August 9th
