In his essay “What is Hauntology?,” Mark Fisher writes, “The disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.” The plot lines that circumscribe our two main characters suspend them in this hauntological realm. Ramón and Stella are trapped in a Vietnam War-era America that feels just as bleak and finite as 2019.



Ramón’s character arc is an initially strong take on racism in America capped with a jingoistic twist. Throughout the film, Ramón is dogged by both his tormentors and police. Ramón’s first few encounters with the law in this film fold into his clashes with the racist bullies. It’s a grim referendum on American life that even while battling literal demons, Ramón must also contend with a much more corporeal evil. Until the climax, the film makes the correct assessment that racism is systemic and doesn’t merely comprise the actions of a few bad actors.



Once we reach the end, however, Ramón’s backstory is revealed, and the impact of his earlier scenes is dampened as a result. Ramón, as it turns out, is a draft dodger. That’s why the cop was after him to begin with. Rather than echoing the racism of the bullies, the local police chief just had a hunch that Ramón was making the—morally correct— decision to skip out on the Vietnam War. The Jangly Man, the monster specifically designed to play on Ramón’s worst fears, calls him a “coward.” Racism winds up being the narrative contrivance that drives some early action and forces Ramón to stay in town.



His real problem, according to the film, is not supporting the war effort. In the end, Ramón relents and goes off to Vietnam. Scary Stories makes the utterly baffling decision, in the Year of Our Lord 2019, to double down on the Vietnam War. The film is clearly concerned with America’s crimes in Vietnam. Besides Ramón’s status as a draft dodger, the background is full of news clips. Even the town’s spooky radio announcer has an opinion on the war—he’s against it—and so, ostensibly, is Ramón. But the film as a text closes in univocal support.



Towards the end of the film, Stella, our protagonist, finds out the truth behind Sarah Bellows and cuts a deal with the ghost to end this entire nightmare. Sarah Bellows’s backstory is truly painful. She was tortured and ultimately killed by her own family for threatening to blow the whistle on the family business, which was poisoning the town’s water supply. Stella’s deal is that she will tell Sarah’s story in exchange for ending the curse. Sarah relents and Stella and Ramón are freed. Yet after the creation of the exonerative book, Stella admits that not many people cared to listen to the story. Sarah Bellows lived a tragic life, and, it would seem, got conned out of true resolution in death. Like Sarah Bellows’s ghost, we wish to hear our stories told but are betrayed by these would-be bards. Scary Stories is set in a past haunted by the Vietnam War, made for adults haunted by eternal remixes of their youth, and aimed at a future straining to reconcile the ghosts of its past. This is a film about layered hauntings— and the horror derives from the fact that, in every case, resolution is denied.



With Scary Stories, another franchise is born. Another immortal, monstrous media property, straining against the bounds of capital until we have on our hands a cartographer’s task the size of a Marvel Universe. The film ends with Stella clutching Sarah Bellows’ cursed book, commenting that the way to free Augie and Chuck from their ghastly deaths must be within its pages. She drives off with Ruth, who has made a miraculous recovery after having spiders erupt from her face, and Sarah’s estranged father, whom the movie hopes we have forgotten was estranged. Sarah Bellows’s rest is ephemeral, and her vindication is an empty gesture. The end leaves you less with a hopeful nod to a better tomorrow and more of a lingering worry that, based on nothing more than the whims of studio execs, we will either get a glut of reboots, prequels, and the origin story of Harold the Scarecrow, or nothing at all. No closure. No end.



Our media landscape is one of eternal work. Augie and Chuck may never rest in their graves. They are damned to be exhumed for a spun-off future. They are made the Sarah Bellows of a tomorrow that is not guaranteed. Our childhoods can never end. We are forced to watch them twist and reform, like the Jangly Man, adapting to new and increasingly distorted forms in order to pursue us. Because Scary Stories struggles to exist in any one time—written in 2019 for late 80’s and early 90’s kids but set during the Vietnam War—the movie exists for someone who doesn’t. It’s a film that is a product of a larger struggle to imagine our way out of an absent future. Like all art near the center of hegemonic power, it struggles to look anywhere but back in on itself. ♦