So, Harold is primed and ready to get revenge when Sarah animates him and sicks him on Tommy on Halloween. Oh, and he's routinely put through the abuse of Tommy Milner, the bully whose parents own the farm where he resides. Not only does he literally have a stick up his ass day in and day out, but no one even bothers to brush all the cockroaches from his face. Sure, her face flickers into a skull from time to time, but in the grand scheme of things, she's not going to be haunting anyone in real life anytime soon. Physically, she's not very intimidating, either - most often she appears only as black shadows creeping along walls and ceilings, until finally taking the form of a near-translucent ghost with wispy long hair and a floor-length dress. Sarah seems very eager to shed her anger and disappear for good. There isn't even the overdone horror twist that by "setting her soul free," she actually just gave her unlimited power (à la The Ring). How scary it actually is: Sarah Bellows might be the twisted architect of every horrific thing that happens in this movie, but in the end, the story takes the easy way out with her, so to speak: Stella is able to "defeat" Sarah by simply promising to tell the vengeful ghost's story (the real story), putting a rest to the legends about her being a child killer. By nightfall, the group finds themselves seeking refuge in the long-abandoned mansion of the Bellows family on the outskirts of town to escape from Tommy, a high school bully. The story opens on Halloween in the small community of Mill Valley, a town in Pennsylvania, in 1968, and soon introduces us to a small group of misfits: Stella (an aspiring horror writer), Chuck (a prankster), Augie (an intellectual), and Ramón (a handsome outsider with a secret). The film brings several individual stories to the big screen, anchored by an overarching story like 1998's Urban Legend. Would it be too juvenile? Or silly? Well, dear reader, let me be the first to tell you that while director André Øvredal's film, produced by Guillermo del Toro, might not offer us anything original, it knows how to dole out grisly scares (and have fun while doing it). I walked into a recent screening of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with few expectations - I loved Alvin Schwartz's books as a kid, but I wasn't sure how stories like "The Big Toe" would translate on the big screen.
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