First posted November 2021.

I remember reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as a child, alongside the Enter If You Dare: Tales from the Haunted Mansion collection and that one story about the girl with the green ribbon around her neck that somehow made its way into all our hands. It’s a classic in the repertoire of weird kids who grew into spooky adults. So of course, when it was announced that Guillermo del Toro was tackling a movie adaptation, I was over the moon.

Though del Toro was heavily involved in the writing and producing of this film, the directing fell to André Øvredal. It still obviously carries many hallmarks of del Toro’s work, but the style of direction is different; this film is something of an anomaly with the other entries in this series, but I wanted to talk about it and no one can stop me.

The film adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a story about stories. I focus on the specific influence of fairytales on del Toro’s work in this series, but this engages more with folklore as a whole, and the storytelling tradition that started from there. Fairytales use stock characters as shorthand to give you information about a story, as I discussed in the Pacific Rim post, but other storytelling traditions that evolved from there use the same technique. The film clues you in with Auggie’s choice of Halloween costume: Pierrot, the sad clown — one of the stock characters in the commedia dell’arte, a form of comedic theatre. Horror, in fact, does this often, and you can even find out which horror stock character you are in a recent quiz on Autostraddle. (Not to flex, but I’m a final girl.)

In my head, this is a fairytale thing, because of who I am as a person, but it is indeed just a storytelling thing. In the commedia dell’arte, you know at a glance who the young lovers are, who the old doctor is, who the servants and clowns are, and with that knowledge established in the opening seconds, you can then get on with the story. You can gloss over establishing that the Innamorati are in love because you know they’re the young lovers, and you accept that story’s already happened. Likewise, we don’t need to spend ages establishing that Snow White is a kind and gentle person because she’s the young princess, we already know her whole deal, and we can get on with what actually happens to her.

Our final girl in Scary Stories, Stella, is established more or less by the opening sweep of her room. She’s smart, she’s a fan of horror films, and she’s a writer herself — she’s genre-savvy, she knows what to look out for, and she’s going to survive. Auggie’s prescient choice of Halloween costume clues us in to his humorous and disgusting downfall; new commedia dell’arte just dropped, Sad Clown Eats Toe. And the legendary mystery, Sarah Bellows: what part does she play?

A storyteller who only exists in the stories she tells, who becomes a story herself, brings to mind, above all else, Scheherazade. She is the framing narrative for the collection of folktales from Asia and north Africa known in the west as the Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights.

The One Thousand and One Nights is a really tricky collection to work with, in no small part due to its size — the incredible number of stories contained within the collection came from many, many sources, and even at the best of times, working with folklore is like playing a centuries-old game of telephone with the past. Factor in starting points from at least five different cultural sources and what you’ve got is, and I say this as lovingly as possible, a mess.

We can track Scheherazade back at least to Indian sources, which include a framing narrative of a concubine telling stories to the king to keep his interest. We get to a story more like the Scheherazade we recognise in the Persian version, Hezār Afsān. In this version, there is a king who marries and executes a new woman every day, until finally one is able to capture his interest by telling stories with cliffhangers every night, only completing the story the following night.

Sarah Bellows is another woman in a difficult situation, telling stories to survive. But Sarah’s stories keep her alive in a different sense than Scheherazade — Sarah, of course, is already dead, and her stories are meant to keep her memory alive, and with it, the possibility that someone will discover the truth that her family imprisoned her to conceal.

The pain Sarah’s family inflicted on her is now inflicted by Sarah through her murderous stories. Our intrepid final girl is, by definition, the one who defeats the monster — but, as with any del Toro work, the monster in this story isn’t exactly monstrous. Once the truth of her family’s crimes is revealed by Stella, Sarah is able to be at peace. She was only a monster as long as history painted her as one.

In fairytales, the truth will always come out: the true bride’s identity will be found out, the crimes of those in power are always revealed in the end. Likewise, in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Sarah’s desperate attempts to blow the whistle on her family’s misdeeds must eventually succeed, though long after her death.