Scare Me: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark For Adults
Photo credit: Shudder
Scare Me: Two strangers meet in the Catskills. One is a best selling author, one is trying to become one. When the power goes out, the two tell stories to try to scare one another. One faces their greatest fear at the end of the night; one is a monster(not the toothy, creature kind).
Just a note, this is not an anthology film, like The Mortuary Collection. There are no cutaways to stories with the actual characters they describe. Everything takes place in the cabin.
Spoilers ahead!
The Premise
Fred(Josh Ruben) is an aspiring writer. He rents an isolated cabin to write a book. His driver, Bettina(Rebecca Drysdale), is also a writer. She loves James Camer-On and his Titanic movies. Titanic movies plural. Her story about Kora is sure to catch his attention.
While on a walk, Fred meets bestselling horror author Fanny(The Boys’s Aya Cash). She is also staying at a nearby cabin. She brushes him off, until a power outage at the cabins brings them together.
Fred
Fred is escaping more than to just write in isolation, à la Jack Torrance from The Shining. He tells Frannie that his ex has a restraining order out against him, and that it is just a misunderstanding. He says she was cheating and that she kicked him out. Sure, he sent her several hundred letters threatening her life, but it was just heat of the moment. He’s seeing a shrink and getting help now.
Fanny
Fanny wrote the best selling novel Venus, about zombies. She is incredibly brash, bitchy, and sounds like she was a liberal arts major, what with the constant barbs about male privilege, gender norms, and other things that really sound pretentious and cause you to not be invited to parties or gettogethers of any kind when you won’t shut up about them. She thinks she knows more than Fred about anything, because, y’know, she’s a woman. Yeah, that kind of person. She carries a notebook with her story ideas in it. Fanny calls pizza “‘za”. She is hard to scare.
The Stories
Fred starts with a werewolf story, because he said that was what he was writing. She complains about it, then tells her own. They take turns until the pizza comes, delivered by Carlo(Joker’s Chris Redd). Carlo is stoked to join in. Fred admits he is jealous of Fanny.
This is the impetus for a night of coke snorting, drinking, and story telling. The three go on until the early hours of the morning, when Carlo leaves.
The Notebook
Fred finds out that Fanny has been writing about him in her notebook, and not in a flattering way. He then decides to scare her. Or is he taking out his rage about his failures on her? And who turns out to be the real monster, at the end? Who ends up with the notebook?
This was really refreshing. It was like sitting in front of a campfire, telling scary stories. I admit that I thought this was an anthology, and was disappointed at first. But anyone that has ever told scary stories, or has been scared by an older sibling telling stories(thanks to my older brothers, I still hate to look out windows at night) will get this film. It’s not perfect, it can be slow, but it is worth a watch!
Scare Me is available on Shudder and other streaming services
