STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK HOW TO

When the “Red Spot” appears as a pimple on the night of the school play she is devastated. For Ruth, her face and her image are as paramount as her popularity. This is most notable with Ruth’s ( Natalie Ganzhorn) vanity and the spiders her cheek becomes home to, as well as Ramón’s ( Michael Garza) fear of being seen as a coward and the Jangly man coming to collect. While ghosts are there, the film lives in body horror and uses it as a tool to explore the fears of the characters.

Spoilers for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark below the image.įor being an all-ages film, Øverdal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Darkoffers up some adult scares. Whether in the form of a book or in a movie, kids can learn life lessons from horror. The genre often focuses on death, inspection of humanity, grief, and trauma. Horror helps children explore those questions safely. Parents want to protect their kids from the world, but in doing so can sweep the answers to a child’s experiences under the rug, leaving them to handle their confusion on their own. This is especially true for children who experience the death of someone around them or, like it was in my case, the violence of bad neighborhood. For younger audiences especially though, horror can be a vital source of finding out why they’re scared and help them confront it. Horror works similarly across all age groups by instilling ideas of cultural fears and examining why we hold them.

In the new film, of the same name, we see director André Øvredal and executive producer Guillermo del Toro’s take on Schwartz’s work, ushering new horror fans into the fold with their take on the stories that chilled us as kids. With Stephen Gammell illustrating haunting images to accompany the tales, we got to see decay, and if you were like me, it got you to ask questions. While Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark wasn’t the first in all-ages and children’s horror, Schwarz offered a different view of the genre. They spelled out death, its imminence, and its reality. For me, Schwartz’s folktales added to this education. This culture is helped along by exposure to stories like the ones I was told as a kid. We open our homes to the dead, and for those who believe, the dead enter. We place pictures of our dead loved ones on alters and offer them food and drink while we paint our faces to make them feel comfortable around us. We celebrate Dia de Muertos yearly and confront death with celebration and not fear. In my family, and in my culture, we know death from a young age. Or, they are kept from finding the vocabulary altogether. All they lack is the words to explain themselves. They feel the same grief as adults, the same fear of death as adults. As a result, they assume kids don’t understand a lot while growing up. Many parents and adults try to protect kids from real-life horrors. When Alvin Schwartz wrote Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, he introduced a whole generation of children to stories that were morbid, insightful, and of course scary. Tales of La Llorona or La Mano Peluda kept me up at night, kept me behaved, and the cucuy kept me from playing in the room where my grandpa stored his hunting gear.

For me, those stories were folktales that my grandma carried with her, and her mother before her, and hers before her, and as far back as we could trace it. For some of us, scary stories have been constant since childhood.

STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK HOW TO

They aimed to teach children how to behave and stay safe in a world ready to eat them up. The first fairytales were horror stories.

Stories are more than just entertainment: they influence us, change us, and ultimately get us ready to face the world.

Stories to tell in the dark