The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 4 days to go.
What is the best way to start a Horror/Thriller film? Start this film on Halloween! This film is based on the books written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell. I admit not to have read the books, so I went into this movie only having seen the trailer twice.
I’m usually not fond of horror suspense movies because I’m slightly scared of watching them. I initially walked into this movie because my older daughter had read the books, and wanted to see it on the big screen (also having Del Toro’s name attached to a film can be an incentive). Boy was I pleasantly surprised by this movie!
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The movie starts with three teenage friends Stella, Auggie, and Chuck who decide to trick or to treat on Halloween. But choose to play a trick on the school bully, Tommy, who always drives around stealing the bags of candy. This time the trio decides to place some unpleasant things in the bag. So as expected Tommy drives by and takes the bag and isn’t happy when he sees what’s inside.
Tommy decides to chase the trio down to a drive-in theater where they encounter Ramon, a Mexican American young man who is watching a film alone. The trio seeks safety in Ramon’s car and briefly learn from each other before being found by Tommy, who gets kicked out of the drive-in for disrupting the audience. Since it’s still Halloween, the group decide to go to a haunted house.
This house has been abandoned for years, and Stella (who is the horror geek of the group and a writer) walks around telling the stories she has learned about the events that occurred in that house. This is where, I think, the film starts to get exciting and the horror/thriller aspect of the film comes to life.
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This group of teens walks around the house trying to scare one another while curiously looking around the house to see what they can find. The haunted house is the Bellows house, whose family (The Bellows Family) was a powerful family of the community until suddenly they all disappear after one of the members (Sarah Bellows) hanged herself. The house has been abandoned since then. Stella and Ramon accidentally find the room where Sarah had been kept in isolation, and Stella is intrigued when she sees the books with Sarah’s stories.
As we all know, curiosity killed the cat, and in this film, it nearly killed all of them. Stella takes a book, and everything goes downhill after that decision.
Stella reads the stories and is fascinated by them, and then suddenly notices that the last story was written has fresh ink. It’s at this moment where she realizes that Sarah is writing the stories, and they are about every single teen that had entered the haunted house. The teens face their biggest fears while trying to figure out a way to make all of it stop.
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I have not read the books, but my older daughter did, and she told me that the books have a series of stories with different children and different monsters per story. So the film just took those teens and placed them in the same movie with each one of them facing a different monster. She told me that the monsters in the book were accurately and identically portrayed on the big screen.
This film mainly uses practical effects for the monsters, and much has to do with Del Toro’s vision. The suspense and thrill work brilliantly in this film, and I would even suggest that this film might become one of those films that we all must watch on Halloween.
This movie slightly showcases a topic that isn’t very much talked about in cinema, which is Mexican Americans and the discrimination they faced at that time. As a Mexican American myself, I was pleasantly surprised to see this on the big screen.
The film in its entirety is brilliantly edited, and the score adds to the suspense, and the jump scares. What looked to be a basic, generic horror film ended up entertaining me and quite frankly scaring me too. This film is perfect as an introductory horror film for young adults. Monsters like spiders (coming out from someone’s face), the jangly man, the toe monster, Harold the scarecrow, and the pale lady would be haunting many young adults or even children for years to come.