Scare Me (2020) - Shudder Spree

Streaming Services: Shudder
Movie Name/Year: Scare Me (2020)
Genre: Comedy, Horror
Length: 104 minutes
Rating: NR
Production/Distribution: Irony Point, Artists First, Last Rodeo Studios, Shudder
Director: Josh Ruben
Writer: Josh Ruben
Actors: Aya Cash, Rebecca Drysdale, Chris Redd, Josh Ruben, Lauren Sick
 
Blurb from IMDb: During a power outage, two strangers tell scary stories. The more Fred and Fanny commit to their tales, the more the stories come to life in their Catskills cabin. The horrors of reality manifest when Fred confronts his ultimate fear.
 

Selina’s Point of View:
Shudder is an all horror, all the time, streaming service. We thought it would be fun to check out what they have to thrill and chill us this Halloween. Their service has a reasonable cost and, in these times, may be more accessible to people who have less to spend. If ever you were going to switch to a horror streaming service, October is the right time. (None of the posts this month are sponsored by Shudder or any companies associated with them.)
 
A lot of their originals have struck a chord with me, but this is not one of them. It’s a pretty poor start to our Shudder Spree.
 
I have to start with what I thought immediately upon the films end: You can’t put only 15-minutes of substance into a boring, cringy film and expect it to be good. I get the ending. I get what they were saying. I understand the point of it all. That doesn’t change that it was torture to get through.
 

Scare Me with its lessons and exceptionally slow start, as well as the whole point of tell rather than show, would work much better as a book – or even an anthology film. As a movie, it’s not very scary and kind of difficult to sit through. There are people who would forgive that because of the interesting 15-minute ending… but I’m not one of them.
 
Where the content itself is concerned, it does have some good writing advice. Still, the story itself is a little hard to swallow because there’s not a likable character anywhere in the flick. Seriously, not even the cab driver.
 
Scare Me isn’t my cup of tea. I’ve seen the reviews. I know it’s an unpopular opinion. I still dislike this film.
 

Cat’s Point of View:
I’ve been fairly addicted to scary tales ever since I brought home my copies of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book trilogy from my scholastic book orders back in middle school. I was so giddy that there was going to be a movie adaptation of those very books that I wrote a whole article about them. Now, given, Scare Me was not set up in the same manner. The description of the film did give me an impression, however, that something similar was likely going to be afoot.
 
What actually transpired on the screen left me with a forlorn sense of disappointment. While I expected supernatural shenanigans to kick off our month-long Shudder Spree in honor of Halloween… what I got was decidedly not that.
 
To be fair, there were plenty of shenanigans. I appreciated how the cast quite literally threw themselves into their parts. I loved the voice work and the physicality of some of the bits. The ambiance for chilling tales was perfect. I just found myself fighting the urge to check the progress bar to see how much of the movie was left for them to squeeze the scares into.
 

I do get it. The film does make sense in a realist way. This was just not what I was hoping for. Disappointment colored the entire production for me once I figured out I likely wasn’t getting what I thought the promo paragraph had promised. There were moments that I got a rush of “oh there it is, now we’re in business,” only for those expectations to be dashed in the next moment. It felt like I was being teased.
 
The pacing was also sluggish. It just felt like it took forever for not much to happen. Had the film been framed as a playful, if dark, writer’s exercise about killing time during a storm with a dash of intrigue (and I use that word very loosely), it would have been more successful in setting the appropriate expectations.
 
Alas, with a chasm of regret that this was the movie we had to open with, I can’t say I would recommend Scare Me to anyone -- not for a scary Halloween movie, at least.
 

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – 83%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score – 95%
Metascore – 62/100
Metacritic User Score – None
IMDB Score – 4.8/10
 
Trust the Dice: Selina’s Rating – 1.5/5
Trust the Dice: Cat’s Rating – 2/5
 
Trust the Dice Parental Advisory Rating: R
 
P.S.: Short mid-credits scene.
 
Movie Trailer: