When one of the teens steals the book, it begins to magically write a series of gruesome scary tales, one for each member of the group. These real-life horrors loom over the small Pennsylvania factory town of Mill Valley, where a group of teens discovers an old book that writes terrible fates for the town’s inhabitants. By contrast, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is set in 1968, and awash with all the cultural anxieties and social issues of the era: racism and white supremacy, controversy over the Vietnam war and the draft, and the fraught politics of a presidential election year in which a segregationist won 13 percent of the vote. Schwartz’s series, which began publishing in 1981, contained stories largely rooted in folk tales and urban legends - effectively timeless. Plastered over a series of campaign posters for Richard Nixon, they flutter in front of the camera for a few moments, an apparent attempt to reset whatever expectations viewers may have for this film, ostensibly an adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s classic children’s book trilogy. Especially the library.One of the first things you see in the new tween horror film Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark is a row of swastikas. That's not saying a lot, but there are some very great sets here that I did enjoy. It's also a bit better than the typical children's movie. They may like this one if they like PG rated horror movies. Kids like plenty of terrible movies with bad plots. But having said all that, just because it's not a good movie doesn't mean kids won't like it. The emotional pull in this movie is minimal at best because everything emotional is dialogue only. It's also just lazy and bad writing for such a big production. For a children's movie this is an especially horrible decision. So if you want to know what they care for or what families they are from it's in the dialogue only. Rather everything is introduced via dialogue. So you can't even properly root for anyone as nothing here is introduced emotionally. We are just put into the magical apartment while getting zero background info. The main story issue is how rushed the background story is. Instead a good enough actor is forced to act out scenes he is just not skilled enough to do and the director clearly guides him into terrible decisions that make for bad scenes. Rather the director should have guided the actors much better and made sure they could act out roles that fit their skills. Both the kids are good enough actors in calm scenes, but when the little boy needs to show any emotional range he is horrible. As I said the characters often just stand around in fear and look at the danger so you have a ton of scenes where the kids just scream or act sad which is where the movie really fails. The camera jumps from place to place even in calm scenes and you get dizzy and confused everywhere. We get a lot of crooked shots from all angles and you have about a shot per second I think. They use multiple cameras and we constantly jump from person to person in dialogues. My main issue with this movie is the editing. A lot of smart decisions could have been made here, but weren't. Often the characters just stand around and do nothing instead of trying to get themselves out of danger which is extremely lazy screenwriting and feels frustrating. It's a very basic story, the acting is acceptable to good. At least now you get way better effects and a bit better acting. I wanted to watch a modern children's movie, but they are all off and mediocre.
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