Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

The plot takes many twists with an ingeniously designed set of monsters creating havoc at regular intervals.

The film... is a loving and faithful adaptation, even if it gets lost in its attempt to wrap the whole thing up in a neat metaphor.

The genre tropes are all alive and well and Scary Stories delivers them with élan but the dispiriting ending hangs over everything like a pall.

Proof, once again, that a creaky floorboard, judiciously used, is worth more than any expensive digital trickery.

Scary Stories hits with the scares as much as it misses with the storytelling, levelling out to a glass half full.

Øvredal's sense of horror is neither notably stark nor significantly ornamental; it's nearly textureless, as if it had been squeezed from a tube.

A very good Goosebumps movie, not a very good Scary Stories movie.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is true to its name ... genuinely creepy, with an incredible sense of atmosphere.

Format-wise, the film may have benefited from being a more straightforward anthology of shorts based on the stories, which were effective because they were so brutally concise.

These and other spooky specters are memorably incarnated, to be sure. But I'm pretty easy to scare, and I can't say I found the movie, directed by Norway's Andre Ovredal of 2010's excellent Trollhunter, all that scary.