Horrible Thoughts Reviews: Crawl and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

It's another promising year for horror in the cinema, but while we at the Lair are waiting impatiently for It: Chapter Two, there's been a couple of horror titles released to stave off the anticipation anxiety.

The first to grab my attention was Crawl, a mid budget creature thriller that's been described as “Jaws but with alligators” but that's a rather unfair and reductive assessment. With it's crushing tension, squishy underground setting and unflinching attitude to broken bones, it actually reminded me a lot more of The Descent than Jaws. The setup is simple but efficient; a swimmer journeys into s hurricane in Florida to check on her estranged father, only to find him trapped in the crawlspace under their old house with monstrous alligators, the storm raging outside, and the water levels rising. Produced by Sam Raimi, the king of squicky injuries himself, it's directed by Alexandre Aja who has a fair few hits and misses under his belt, thankfully this is one of the hits. The film never tries to push any boundaries, there's nothing particularly novel on show here, but it's enjoyably tense and nasty and never outstays its welcome.

Next up is Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a very loose adaptation of the children's horror anthology that traumatised a whole generation of kids with its genuinely horrifying illustrations in the 80s and 90s. As one of those children, I still can't look at some of those images without shuddering to this day, I was curious to see how the tales would translate to the big screen, especially as it was produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Andre Ovredal, the Norwegian director who brought us 2010's brilliant Troll Hunter and the inventive 2016 flick The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Unfortunely, although the creature design is intriguingly disturbing and the direction is solid, Scary Stories is a bit of a mess. The script is atrocious (the line “we're not reading the book, the book's reading us” elicited laughter and groans from the cinema I was in), the story shifts constantly between basic and incomprehensible, and the editing can only be described as drunken. There's one particular sequence wherein a horrible monster is pursuing one of the young cast through a series of hallways, walking slowly but appearing around every corner. It's fairly standard stuff, the monster is suitably grotesque, shot half out-of-focus and obscured by intense red lighting. Now any sane editor would use these shots for most of the sequence, saving the tight close up that reveals the creature in its full monstrosity for the end of the scene, but Scary Stories decides that that shot needs to be one of the first we see of the thing, completely shattering any tension the scene might have had. I understand the desire to use that shot, it's a fairly good imitation of the illustration from the book, but it really shouldn't have been the second shot in the scene.

There are a lot of very strange decisions in the film, from a perplexing subplot about the Vietnam War that seems to clumsily come out in favour of the draft, to some daft changes to the original stories that makes one wonder why they were included in the first place. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't actually have a great deal of nostalgia for the books. The images definitely scarred me, but the stories themselves were, looking back on them, fairly ordinary and not particularly well written. There were a handful of stories whose twists packed a punch and given that some of these were among the half dozen or so adapted for the film, it baffles me as to why they were so altered.

All in all, it's a poor adaptation and an even worse film. The young actors do a reasonable job with the nonsense they're given and it is admittedly fun to see the illustrations come to life, but unless you're particularly into creature design or you're still in need of something to get over the trauma of seeing those illustrations, I'd give this one a miss.