Save for a small handful of recent films like “The House with the Clock in Its Walls” or the “Goosebumps” movies — nearly all with Jack Black as comic relief — chillers for children are an uncommon…
Save for a small handful of recent films like “The House with the Clock in Its Walls” or the “Goosebumps” movies — nearly all with Jack Black as comic relief — chillers for children are an uncommon and somewhat dicey proposition. For horror filmmakers even interested in trying, they have to hit an exceedingly narrow target, offering enough scares and intensity to delight intrepid tweens without sending them diving under their parents’ comforters with nightmares. Based on J.A.
Co-produced by Sam Raimi through his Ghost House Pictures shingle, “Nightbooks” often feels like a kid-friendly version of Raimi’s “The Evil Dead II,” with its haunted locale, its magical books flush with ancient specters and even an enchanted forest sequence that deploys his deranged POV camera technique.
Young Alex is already in major distress before he even encounters the witch, however. His passion for the horror genre has made him a pariah among his grade-school peers, which leads him to dismantle a bedroom full of posters for movies such as “The Lost Boys” and “The People Under the Stairs,” and to gather his “nightbooks” of self-penned short stories for disposal in the basement furnace of his apartment building.
Having fallen into this supernatural trap, Alex is offered a chance to stay alive if he writes a new story for Ritter’s witch every night that meets with her approval. In the meantime, he befriends another prisoner, Yasmin , who’s been under the witch’s thumb for a long time and can help him navigate an apartment full of macabre surprises, like a night garden populated by strange plants and diabolical creatures.
Best known for playing the title character in Tom McCarthy’s Disney Plus feature “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” Fegley adds a year and a pair of spectacles to a similar brand of preteen precociousness, but “Nightbooks” grounds his character in a more recognizable fear and anxiety. The irony at the film’s center is that the witch provides Alex with a more attentive and appreciative audience for his work than his parents or his peers.
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