By now you've probably seen André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. But just in case you haven't seen the superbly crafted PG-13 horror story meant to terrify audiences of all ages, consider this your spoiler warning. We'll be getting into each of the big-screen baddies who haunt the teens at the center of this spooky story in order to see just which of them rivaled the nightmarish narrative and illustrations of the source material's author Alvin Schwartz and illustrator Stephen Gammell.

Through a combination of in-camera effects and creepy lighting techniques; practical effects work by talented costuming, make-up, production design, and wardrobe teams; digital effects masters bringing written horror into the real world; and talented actors like Troy James, Javier Botet, Kathleen Pollard, and Mark Steger, the monsters at the heart of Scary Stories now occupy a place in Hollywood history as well as the dark recesses of our memories and imaginations. But which ones will really keep us up at night? Read on to find out!

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Here's the official synopsis for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark:

It’s 1968 in America. Change is blowing in the wind…but seemingly far removed from the unrest in the cities is the small town of Mill Valley where for generations, the shadow of the Bellows family has loomed large. It is in their mansion on the edge of town that Sarah, a young girl with horrible secrets, turned her tortured life into a series of scary stories, written in a book that has transcended time—stories that have a way of becoming all too real for a group of teenagers who discover Sarah’s terrifying home.

And here are our latest write-ups on Scary Stories to get you all caught up:

The Pale Lady

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In Schwartz's story “The Dream,” the wide-mouthed Pale Lady serves to warn the protagonist (and the reader) to flee rather than serve as a specific threat herself. But Gamell's illustration of the colorless, formless heap of the character--an approximation of a human woman with thin tendrils of oily hair and two beady eyes floating in a face cut nearly in half by a long thin smile--is enough to send you running even without a word of warning. But this is one example where the specter of something looming just around the corner of your bedroom while you read is much scarier than actually seeing the Pale Lady hobble towards you down a hallway.

The filmmakers admittedly had a tough time translating the Pale Lady to the big screen, as Vulture reports. What blew me away about this article is the fact that the Pale Lady, who looks like a digital creation on the screen (especially since the sequence in question needs multiples of the creepy character who close in on Chuck (Austin Zajur), the poor unfortunate teen who gets trapped in her embrace), is actually a practical effect. The dream-like sequence of the Pale Lady getting closer and closer to her prey was a painstaking shoot that required Steger, wearing thick latex foam studded with microspheres of padding to mimic cellulite, to slowly creepy forward, bit by bit, step by step. But for me, the slow creeping dread and the rather unscary effects work (practical or otherwise) make the Pale Lady a bit of a drag.

Sarah Bellows

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Now you might think that the Big Bad of the story should be the scariest of the Scary Stories. In a sense, Sarah Bellows is pretty terrifying. Her power stretches from the world of the dead to the realm of the living, fueled by the vengeful spirit who was wronged in life and continues to be desecrated in death. She's the author of the title stories, each carefully written about specific subjects who find themselves unable to escape their fates once their tale begins to unfold. That's horrifying. The idea that a pissed-off ghost can bring about your end just by writing it (okay, it requires children's blood ink, but still) is some God-level smiting, or at least some Chuck Shurley-levels of messing with destiny.

But the spooky specter herself isn't all that scary. By the time we meet her in the spectral flesh, we know the truth of Sarah Bellows and the awful life she lived, so it's hard to feel too frightened of her when pity has replaced all that. And if you've seen a scary movie or two in your time, you probably know that avenging an angry spirit is a great way to get them to stop doing the "killing all your friends" shtick. That's exactly what we get here. While Sarah Bellows does get a mighty shriek befitting her surname before going off into the great beyond, she's not super substantial when it comes to scare factor.

Spiders

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This one's going to be a bit more subjective. Some people can deal with spiders; some people will freak out and launch into orbit if they so much as see one, let alone come into contact with one (or hundreds ... or thousands.) For poor Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn), who's probably the latter now if she wasn't before, "Arachnophobia" now likely means more to her than "That weird old movie my dad made us watch one time."

Gotta say, the effects here were super fun to watch, especially as the red spot (which just so happens to be the title of this spideriffic short story, in case you didn't know) grows larger and larger over the course of a few scenes. Eventually, that little black hair sprouting out of the center of Ruth's blemish ... why, that ain't a hair at all, but a twitching spider leg!

A good 20% of the people in my theater lost their spider-hatin' minds at this point, and that's as good as any reason to move this monster up a few spots even before hundreds of baby spiders burst forth to nearly consume poor Ruth. The only thing keeping the spiders in check (other than a bucket of janitorial mop water, which, for my school store dollars, is way grosser than spiders) is the fact that they didn't get a chance to kill Ruth, only severely physically and psychologically damage her for what's likely the rest of her adult life.

The Toe Ghoul

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Your mileage may vary on this one, but I'm not a fan of A) eating Corpse Soup, or B) Having said corpse from whom said soup was made coming after me for eating said soup. Schwartz hits you with a dose of the gustatorial and grotesque in "The Big Toe", which sees a young boy finding a severed big toe in the garden. The boy shows it to his father who, in a totally normal response, suggests they have it for supper. Schwartz's descriptions of carving said toe up into three slices always creeped me out more than the toe's owner itself (only organic, locally sourced toe for me, thank you), but Scary Stories ups the ante on this one.

The first bit of skin-crawling squeamishness we get from this sequence is in watching Auggie (Gabriel Rush) take a big ol' spoonful of Toe Soup. The audience knows it and Auggie's friends know it; only Auggie doesn't know that the toe doth float in and flavor the soup ... until it's too late. That's all well and good for the vomit factor here, but the fear factor slips in when the toe's owner comes calling to collect.

Props to Botet for yet another gruesome and disturbing practical creature here, but even more props to Øvredal for taking a familiar "hiding under the bed" sequence and ratcheting up the tension. Audiences are practically screaming at Auggie to either hurry up and do the thing he's about to do or not to do it at all. But Auggie takes cues from his director, so the build-up is slow and nail-biting, right up to a one-two punch of jump scares that seal the deal.

Harold the Scarecrow

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Here's a fan-favorite from the books and an obvious Hero (as far as monsters go) in Scary Stories. Steger gets to play another Chonk, this time the empty-bellied, straw-stuffed, cockroach-infested scarecrow, Harold. You see, Harold is the subject of repeated beatings and ridicule by local sports douche-turned-Army private, Tommy (Austin Abrams). Though Harold does his best to protect the crops of the family farm, Tommy hates this scarecrow even more than he hates the Civil Rights and burgeoning Women's Liberation movements. So no one really bats an eye when Harold goes off-book (and off-hook) and makes Tommy one of the disappeared ones. The town thinks the kid's gone AWOL, but he's actually right there in plain sight.

The reality of a PG-13 horror movie is that you have to get creative with your scares and your gore-factor; you're forced to. Luckily, the creative team behind Scary Stories is well-versed in delivering non-traditional kill scenes and vengeful punishment. Was it a shock when young Master Thomas got a pitchfork through his guts, courtesy of a shambling ol' scarecrow? Yup! Was it more shocking when, instead of blood and viscera, Tommy started puking up straw? You'd better stuffing believe it! I loved watching the transformation of Tommy into the new straw-headed scarecrow, along with a lovely metaphorical subtext worthy of T.S. Eliot (whose inspired another horror movie, CATS, due out later this year). But what I love more is the possible connection to a character later in the story...

When we get to meet the Bellows Family, we learn that after Sarah's death, the entirety of the family disappeared. They didn't dissolve their ownership of the mill, they didn't leave a forwarding address or buy a family yacht to sale off into the sunset. They just *poof* vanished. And the idea is that Sarah's stories were her last act of vengeance against her truly awful family members. So what if Harold Bellows, her older brother (I believe), never actually left, but was doomed to rot on that wooden frame in the middle of a field for decades and decades? And now, ol' Harold may have found a way out thanks to Tommy. But he would only have been activated by Sarah's powers, so where is he now? Perhaps in the same place that all of Stella's (Zoe Margaret Colletti) other friends have gone ...

The Jangly Man

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The Jangly Man is near the top of the creep heap here. You just can't really out-do a movie monster who can disassemble himself, only to reassemble himself later after his various parts roll around town like a tumbleweed. That's all kinds of horrifying. And then there's the fact that Jangle-bro likes to throw his severed head down chimneys (which are a regular feature in most police stations), shout "Me tie dough-ty walker", and encourage any local dogs to participate in the game of speaking nonsense before ostensibly scaring them to death. Oh, and neither shooting the Jangly Man point-blank nor smashing it between vehicles at a high rate of speed have any hope of stopping him.

But much like Jangly Man himself is an assemblage of body parts, so too is the character an amalgam of various creeps from Schwartz's stories. There's the aforementioned influence from the "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker" story, the "great, gangling man" from "What Do You Come For", and the reanimated dancing corpse from "Aaron Kelly's Bones." As writer-producer Guillermo del Toro told Vulture in the aforementioned article, this specter was supposed to represent Ramón's (Michael Garza) dead brother returning from Vietnam. The creature was originally going to have eight limbs, essentially combining two full bodies, but that would have required too much digital work. Instead, some clever practical effects and costume work coupled with James' amazing innate abilities to flex and stretch into bizarre positions were instrumental to bringing Jangly Man to life. This one will stick with us in ways others on this list might not.

The Bellows Family

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So far in this list, we've seen ghosts, ghouls, spiders, scarecrows, creeping dread and disembodied horror. I hate to break it to you but those things aren't real. Well, okay, spiders and scarecrows are real, but not in the way they're portrayed in this film, right? So what is really scary in Scary Stories? The things that exist in the real world and, likely, in our very families and friend circles.

The Bellows suck as a family. I hope Scary Stories got that message across. They were basically founding members of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania back in the day because they owned and ran the mill that gave it its name and its industry. But like many rich, entitled, and incestuous people in power (in fiction and otherwise), the Bellows used their influence to subjugate the weak, control the powerful, and escape punishment for either action ... at least until Sarah took their power back.

The Bellows not only imprisoned Sarah--their daughter, stricken with achromasia/albinism--in an overwrought basement dungeon, they subjected her to brutish medical treatments like electroshock therapy in order to cure her of whatever it was they thought afflicted her. (Albino people are still persecuted around the world, so this fact may hit home more for some than others.) So she wasn't just literally kept in the dark at home, she was tortured and kept as a guinea pig of sorts by her own flesh and blood in the asylum as well. Some part of this was because of the Bellows' shame at having such an obviously different (and therefore "defective", in their eyes) member of the family, but another part was control. They knew that their mill was polluting the town's water supply with deadly mercury and was responsible for the death of children, and Sarah knew it, and could prove it. They couldn't let that get out, so they turned to increasingly evil methods of manipulation. What's scary about that isn't how quickly her family members turned on each other to protect their hides, it's how relevant and relatable their behavior is to our modern reality.

And that's what makes the next specter the scariest of them all...

Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War

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You may not have been expecting the grim specter of the late Richard Nixon to be the King Creep of this list, but then again you probably didn't expect the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War to play a significant part of the Scary Stories plot either. The politics at play in 1968 rarely make it into any moments of serious discussion in the movie, but realities like draft-dodging, systemic racism, and the funneling of America's youth into overseas combat in a protracted, unwinnable war are horrors that should strike home for any American audience member who's been paying the slightest bit of attention over the last, say, 50+ years in this country. So while the Ghost of Richard Nixon probably won't keep you awake at night, his administration's practices of Vietnamization, the Southern Strategy, and the legacy they've inspired today absolutely should. (But hey, good thing we, as a country, learned hard lessons from all that, yeah?)

National politics play to the background of Scary Stories but their effects are felt in waves. On the small scale, you've got the local Mill Valley chief of police (Gil Bellows, in an ironic bit of casting when it comes to the actor's surname) who spends more time harassing Ramón Morales than he does responding to any other law-breaking in town. Nevermind the missing kids, horrific monsters that have been wreaking havoc all over town, and the various reports of breaking-and-entering and vandalism. Chief Turner got what was coming to him when he went toe-to-toe with the Jangly Man, but that didn't change anything else in town, really. Despite avenging a powerful spirit and unearthing a long buried truth in Mill Valley, the kids who went missing are still missing and Ramón is still going to be shipped off to Vietnam to a fate that's, hopefully, different from that of his deceased brother.

The movie ends on a strange sort of cliffhanger with Stella and a recently emancipated Ruth driving off in search of a way to find their missing friends and family. It also ends with Stella promising to write Ramón every day, so I'm hoping that she finds a way to channel Sarah's powers into writing a story that keeps him safe. Stella's writing has also found its way into the press, which still has the power to educate and illuminate whether it's a small-town paper or a front-page headline of national news written by Woodward and Bernstein. But the Fourth Estate is only as powerful as the people who read and respond to it allow it to be.

"Stories hurt, stories heal," but it's important to get your stories out there before they consume you. The scariest story of all is the one that you never want to share for fear of being vulnerable, being exposed, and exposing others and their wrongdoings in the process; and that's the story that demands to be told.

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