Growing up in the 90’s, scholastic horror was all the rage. A generation cut their teeth on R.L. Stine’s ‘Goosebumps’, devouring forbidden stories of devious child heroes and things that go bump in the night, before graduating to Steven King works. Few threaded the needle between Stein’s adolescent-aimed novellas and King’s more mature themes better than Alvin Schwartz with his 1981 shorts collection “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”. A dark mirror reflection of Shel Silverstein whimsy and optimism, Schwartz’s bleak poems were outlandish and spooky, often eliciting Cronenbergian body horror and a sense of cruel recompense to disturbing effect. Coupled with Stephen Gammell’s drawings, a splattering of acid-influenced black-and-white gothic art pocked with American splotches of red, white, and blue, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” were OG nightmare fuel for a whole generation of kiddos looking to get their kicks with a good bedtime scare.

Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe director André Øvredal’s adaptation largely manages to capture the eerie allure of Schwartz’s best passages but forced to patch them onto a milquetoast central narrative, his tale becomes one of dizzying peaks and valleys. As far as a PG-13 horror adaptation, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark showcases plenty of dark delights with the various translations of a half-dozen or so of the book’s shorts translated masterfully to screen. Through a combination of faithful, practical effects-driven creature design and a classically suspenseful tone, Øvredal’s builds unsettling tableaus. They won’t quite terrify the hardcore horror fans but are certain to give younger audience members looking to pursue a career as a horror junkie a nice introductory bump. What doesn’t work so well is the larger central narrative that weaves these smaller stories together.

It’s 1968 and in some small Pennsylanvia suburb, Stella (Zoe Colletti) readies for Halloween. While Stella and her best – and only – friends Chuck (Austin Zajur) and Auggie (Gabriel Rush) plotting revenge against the neighborhood bully Tommy (Austin Abrams), out-of-towner Ramón (Michael Garza) drives into the picture with a secret. Their paths cross at a drive-in showing of George Romero’s seminal “Night of the Living Dead” and Ramón’s car becomes an incidental safe space after Stella, Auggie and Chuck assault longtime antagonist Tommy with a flaming bag of human poo in the film’s few moments of genuinely well-crafted character developing. As must happen with these kinds of movies, the cast end up at a haunted house, where they find a secret room behind a secret door, with a secret book and a forbidden incantation. Stella stupidly utters some irreversible cursed words and soon everyone becomes the target of a vengeful ghost with a penchant for storytelling.

There’s obvious logic to the decision to bend Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark into a vision of a twisted storyteller but the screenwriting team consisting of Dan and Kevin Hageman (Trollhunters, Ninjago, Hotel Transylvania) and producer Guillermo del Toro can’t manage to make that larger narrative arc either original or all that compelling in its own right. Their attempt to frame the film as distinctly not-anthological doesn’t make the film feel any less divided against itself, one with really compelling chapters forklifted into an uninvolving larger story. The most obvious comparison is to the 2015 Goosebumps movie, which also decided to use the idea of stories escaping their book, though Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is much more effective at honoring its horror roots, rather than paying it smarmy lip service and goofing off.

Through Harold, a walking leather-faced scarecrow who turns his victims into explosions of straw; the Pale Lady, a moon-faced balloon of a creeper, there at every corner you turn; and the Jangly Man, a rotten flesh take on a malevolent Humpty Dumpty; Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark revels in its horrifying imagery, using producer Guillermo del Toro’s knack for practical effects to bring Gammell’s disturbing scratchings to life in vivid detail. These moments are flashes of lightning in Scary Stories’ otherwise bland and bumbling story, one that is further distressed by generally weak performances from its predominant child cast.

Delivering clunky expositional dialogue or a well-timed shriek, star Zoe Colletti is passable but unremarkable; Michael Garza as Ramón is the acting equivalent of white bread, offering a shoulder shrug of a performance as a character with an arc that doesn’t really deliver and heads in a wildly questionable direction in his final moments; the exuberant Austin Zajur feels like he fell off the set of a Disney Channel show, which can be amusing to a point; but only Gabriel Rush seems to nail the understated comedic tone and eerie notes that is so often hammed up by the rest of his young thespian compatriots. Getting children actors right is a near-impossible act (one that only It has done well recently) and Scary Stories misses wide with their most pivotal characters, making it harder to really care about their journeys when they’re not cornered by some dreadful fiend or other.

As much as the teenage performances aren’t really living up to their end of the bargain, the script has some major issues of its own to overcome. Though there’s a puzzle-like joy to seeing how del Toro and the Hagemans have woven Schwartz’s various shorts together, they fail in making the final completed puzzle into something worth admiring. Even some of the main conceits invented for the film adaptation don’t make a lick of sense. At one point, Stella mutters, “You don’t read the book, the book reads you.” The problem is that this central concept simply doesn’t follow. The characters are not connected in any way to the ghouls that come to haunt them; they are not dark reflections of themselves or their worst fears physically manifested. There’s nothing inherently interconnected about a bully and a scarecrow, a theater girl and a pimple full of spider babies. It just seems like something that the writers assumed to be a cool line without any thought into how that would actually look if they followed that idea to its conclusion. With the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon provide a backdrop to this story about manipulative adults scapegoating children, it only seems right that we place the true blame of Scary Stories shortcoming on the adults in the room, rather than fingering the (admittedly lame) child performances.

CONCLUSION: ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ thrives when bringing Alvin Schwartz’s shorts to life in creepy vivid detail but the larger story is hamstrung by middling child performances and a plot that borrows from an extended list of tired horror movie tropes. Another in the Guillermo del Toro-produced ouevre that is technically proficient but a creative let-down.