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Culture July 10, 2017
How was this published as a children's book?!
To this day, young adults are baffled by their early exposure to “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”
The chilling stories of Alvin Schwartz, complemented by the disturbing illustrations of Stephen Gammell, are nothing less than terrifying. Why Harper & Row Publishers thought “Horror, Children’s” was a suitable combination of genres, we may never know.
So without further ado, here are five of the scariest stories ever that gave anxiety to five-year-olds everywhere.
This delightful tale begins with a young man minding his own business. He sees a woman struggling to carry a basket, so being the good-guy protagonist that he is, he offers a helping hand. The woman agrees and proceeds to hand over her basket… with her head inside of it. But it doesn’t end there.
The headless woman chases after him, chews on his legs and then disappears. Again, this is a children’s book. For children. What moral does this teach you? Don’t help people out or they’ll remove their head and eat you for breakfast?
If you have arachnophobia, you can blame Schwartz and Gemmell for the years of therapy you need after reading this story. Basically, a woman gets a spider bite on her face, and it hurts for a few days.
Then the natural course of events, of course, is to have her face burst with thousands of tiny spiders that have hatched from a nest inside her pores. Good luck sleeping, kids!
Of all the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” this one was cruel in so many twisted, twisted ways. Fade in on a group of rambunctious youths discussing the ever-popular idea of hanging out at a cemetery (this habit must be exclusive to movie teenagers).
One boy claims that you will get pulled underground if you stand on a grave long enough. A girl refutes this claim by testing it out herself. She also brings a handy-dandy knife along, because there’s no way that can go wrong.
Long story short, girl accidentally stabs her dress into the ground and dies of fright. So imagine telling this moral to a child: “Don’t get scared, you might die.” Lovely.
This story is designed to stay relevant in the reader’s life all the way into adulthood, because Alvin Schwartz hates you.
The famous storyline goes as follows: a babysitter receives constant calls from a guy, the guy “I’m gonna murder you, and also I’m getting closer and closer, because I like terrorizing people [paraphrased].” Finally, the operator traces the call to the phone upstairs. End of story.
So essentially, Schwartz wrote these books for children, knowing that in a few years, they would be of age to babysit. This is just 50 Shades of Absolutely Not Ok.
This story is short and sweet, but replace the sweet with “horrifically terrifying”. A young couple is “hanging out” in a parked car (as young couples do), and the girlfriend expresses her desire to go back home.
This request is understandable, given the radio announcement of the crazy hook killer on the loose. Despite this very real danger, the boyfriend insists that they stay, ’cause why not wait for death a little longer. Eventually, the boy opens the girl’s car door, only to find a bloody hook attached to it.
It’s understandable that abstinence is promoted in high schools, but this form of sex education is a little extreme.
So there you have it — a short list of reasons why “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” won’t let you sleep at night. If support groups of adults traumatized by Alvin Schwartz start popping up all over the country, we will not be surprised.
