I know it's riding the success of that Goosebumps movie but this tries to be more of a horror movie than the spooky adventure so I feel it finds a niche.

Still more of an adventure movie than a horror movie but it works. A mysterious and dark exploration of an unknown force in which I was never certain about the safety of any character except the protagonist. Kind of goofy in parts but since I never gave this movie much credit in the first place, it never really jarred.

With many vivid sequences, this packs a lot of nostalgia and thankfully they keep the designs from the original illustrations.

They actually have a pretty neat plot dreamed up and it's nice to see they were conscientious about depicting police realistically.

Ending scenes kind of annoyed me though. He was so close...

Dodge the draft!

Another day, another Halloween-friendly horror anthology, still made for kids but a little more adult in tone than something like GOOSEBUMPS. This in fact feels a lot like TRICK 'R' TREAT but is nowhere near on the level of that movie, and a lot of the time I felt like I was watching a deliberate STRANGER THINGS imitator. There are five stories collected here, and they're all entirely predictable, with youths or youngsters menaced by various CGI nasties. Killer spiders, scarecrows and madness are the order of the day, the highlight being the scenes in which the gang are harassed by a creepy contorted corpse monster which looks great. The rest is merely okay; I've seen a lot better and I've seen a lot worse, and this sits somewhere in the middle.

It's Halloween, 1968 in the town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania. Stella Nicholls is out with her friends Auggie Hilderbrandt and Chuck Steinberg. They are pursued by bully Tommy Milner after the friends pull a prank on him. They find sanctuary in Ramón Morales' car in the drive-in. Stella leads the group to a haunted house. They escape from scary things including Tommy's revenge. Stella takes an old book from the abandoned house. You don't read the book as much as the book reads you. It belongs to Sarah Bellows who lived a tragic life and died horribly.

It's a good in-between horror between the kiddie spooky stories and outright adult gore-fest horrors. I like all the characters. I like the teen actors. I like the spooky and slightly scary stories. I like the idea of the book and the body horrors. The zombie looks good and I expected nothing less from a Guillermo del Toro production. It is not quite an adult horror but it's a good step up from a kiddie campfire story.