Scary Stories to tell in the dark

This is a slightly odd movie as sits in a weirdly in-between audience level – it’s basically designed as young-audience horror movie, but it’s a little too intense for the very young and, perhaps, a tad too childish for teens who can seek out more adult horror fairly easily. Based on a popular-in-the-US series of children’s books, it has a very keen sense of design, and a plot that is designed to lead from horror-set-piece to horror-set-piece (and it tends to peak in the set-pieces and flail around a little when getting from A to B). It’s got a nice pseudo retro set up in the late 60s though this sorta seems to stop mattering as much later on, and some reasonably generic teen leads who get involved with a mysterious book that writes out horror stories that seem to lead to deadly fates for each of them. The design for a few of the horrific creatures have a nice feel to them, and it does play somewhat in the same retro-kids-horror field that throwbacks to the Amblin 80s films in the same way the recent “Goosebumps” and “The House with the Clock in its Walls”, without quite capturing the go-for-broke energy that either of those did. Probably this is really just for design geeks and those who want a not-too-demanding time.