My dear readers, I am pleased to report that we are but days away from the arrival of yet another All Hallow’s Eve! Soon, this most lovely season will come to its gleeful climax -- pumpkins will become luminescent, fantastical outfits will be assembled and Samhain will rise once more to rend the night’s peace with the screams of abducted children. The little scamps that manage to avoid this hideous fate sometimes find their way to our doorstep to plead for treats, and I cannot help but feel as though one should reward their good fortune. For this purpose, I have been hoarding all of our root licorice, artificial walnuts, boiled cherries, “wet trenchers,” toffee razors and other assorted sweetmeats. I do hope the children will be pleased.

Stella Nicholls (Zoe Margaret Colletti) is quite familiar with honoring this most joyous of holidays. An aspirant author of horror fiction, Stella adores the season and does not settle for routine rites of observance. Much like other children their age, Stella and her schoolmates don costumes, panhandle for sweets and perhaps even engage in the odd “practical” jest. But these familiar activities are a mere aperitif for experienced makers of mischief such as these, and so Stella and her friends end up capping off their night with a visit to the Bellows estate, an abandoned property thought to be occupied by the restless spirits of the Bellows family.

Inside the resplendent residence, they discover a volume belonging to the long-departed Sarah Bellows. The book contains Sarah’s own handwritten tales of terror and, sensing that she has uncovered the work of a kindred spirit, Stella decides it best to take the book home with her. It turns out Sarah is a persistent old bird, and she has not quite allowed death to stand in the way of her literary career. Fresh passages appear suddenly on the volume’s pages and their content becomes something of a sensation right away. This is mainly because Sarah’s stories directly reference members of Stella’s social circle and, what’s more, they prove to be prescient -- whatever scene transpires on the page almost immediately replicates itself in real life. Lively as the stories may be, Stella would prefer to avoid seeing her own fatal plot penned and she does her best to stifle Sarah’s creative efforts.

André Øvredal, director of superb films about troll hunting and corpse ogling, is certainly no novice when it comes to monstrous matters and he does a lovely job of transporting the denizens of Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s literary series to the silver screen. I find I could have spent several hours just gazing at these affectionately rendered creatures. But once one gets past all the PG-13 frights, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark emerges as something far more complex, a film that manages to get at the very heart of artistic desire. Every writer, painter, musician and all that sort of thing yearns to produce the same effect that Sarah Bellows achieves so easily -- for their audience to find a sort of urgent relevance in the work before them. And what could be more personally pertinent to a reading public than stories about their own demise at the hands of some supernatural terror? 

Though Sarah’s stories do not receive widespread recognition, Stella and her schoolmates are certainly quite impressed by how relatable they find the material. I imagine that many a creatively minded sort left the old cineplex wishing that they could affect the lives of their audience in quite the same fashion.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark runs 108 minutes and is rated PG-13 for terror, violence, disturbing images, thematic elements, language including racial epithets and brief sexual references.