But hey, at least it’ll teach kids cool vocabulary words like “coroner” and “undertaker” and “embalming fluid”! According to Schwartz, this urban legend’s place of origin seems to be the American Midwest, but variations on the theme also appear in Indian folklore as well as ancient Greek mythology, in the stories of both Medea and Hercules. The moral here is unclear - don’t go to dances? Don’t shop secondhand? Funeral homes can be pretty messed up? - but the story is all the more upsetting because the girl was having her Cinderella moment and, like another famous prom horror story, Carrie, it was cut violently short. It turns out, the dress she rented was stolen from a corpse before burial, and she was poisoned with embalming fluid that activated when she sweated, slowly stopping her blood flow. The next morning, her mother finds her dead. She rents a beautiful gown and is the belle of the ball, but eventually gets dizzy - from too much dancing, she thinks - and asks her date to take her home. Here’s how it goes: a poor girl is invited to a formal dance, but she can’t afford a dress. This story has all the elements of a classic urban legend: teenagers, paper-thin social commentary, and a disquieting twist. Because nothing screams “I’m just learning to read” like a story about a woman whose head falls off, right? You’ve gotta love questionable kids’ horror. Several of the people I asked mentioned stories that actually aren’t a part of this series as those that scared them most, including “The Green Ribbon.” In reality, they likely read the latter, oft-retold story in Schwartz’s book for even younger readers, In A Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories. Also, in the course of researching and rereading the series, I discovered a sort of Mandela Effect surrounding these books that’s creepy in its own right. Some things worth noting: this list isn’t going for the popular vote (everyone remembers “The Big Toe,” for example, but in retrospect, it’s funnier than it is scary) but rather for the stories - deep cuts included - that’ll send shivers up your supposedly grown-up spine. In that case, we’ve got you covered with this list of 12 by Schwartz that might still leave you sleeping with the light on, no matter how old you are. The movie is good, but if you grew up reading the books, it’s likely to leave you eager to revisit more scary stories. The PG-13 film, which includes excellent creature design and some legitimate thrills, covers about six of the anthology books’ dozens of stories and cushions them in a full-fledged plot. The movie of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, directed by André Øvredal ( The Autopsy of Jane Doe ) and executive produced by Guillermo del Toro, is only a loose adaptation of Schwartz and Gammell’s books. Love for the series has been sustained by a recent re-issuing of the books (one that restored illustrator Stephen Gammell’s horrifying but beloved illustrations, which were briefly replaced with tamer artwork in 2011), a documentary about the series and author, and now, finally, a big-screen adaptation. The intervening decades haven’t dulled the primal shock these collections of urban legends, regional folk tales, and campfire stories have left on their now-adult readers, a feeling that’s equal parts nostalgic and nightmarish. If you ask a group of Millennials what they remember about the most-banned book series of the ‘90s, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the answers will come fast and panicky, often in incomplete sentences.
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