Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nightbooks’ on Netflix, Creepy Tween Horror Starring Krysten Ritter as a Basic Witch

The title of Netflix’s Nightbooks has a distinct ring to it — you know, a compound word representing a scarefest based on a YA book, something along the lines of Duskcreeps or Creeptomes or Eeriestories, stuff like that. Hands-down the most shocking fact about this Sam Raimi-produced adaptation of J.A. White’s youth novel is, it’s not a dozen-volume series, but a standalone story about a couple of kids imprisoned by a witch. White has written a couple of different series, so why Netflix chose something with a beginning, middle AND an end to adapt is one of the great mysteries of the universe. I mean, the movie is a paltry 100 minutes of content — where’s the ambition to develop yet another potential franchise with multiple trilogies, prequel series and anime spinoffs? Slackers, all of ’em. Whether or not Nightbooks is worthy of such treatment is beside the point, but I guess that doesn’t stop us from assessing it anyway, as follows.

NIGHTBOOKS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: IT WAS A STORMY NIGHT. IT WAS ALSO A DARK NIGHT. Rain batters an apartment building. Inside one of those apartments, Alex (Winslow Fegley of Timmy Failure fame) is extraordinarily upset. He’s a horror maven who’s surely too young to have seen all the cool gory movies advertised via the scads of posters on his bedroom walls, so there may be questionable parenting happening here. But that’s not why he’s crying. He shoves aside all his Fangoria magazines and grabs all the horror stories he’s written, vowing to burn them. His parents speak in hushed tones in another room as he sneaks out of the apartment to the elevator. He wants to go to the basement but there’s a rumble and a flickering of lights and strange disembodied murmuring and he ends up on the fourth floor, where exists an apartment that seems to exist out of time. He has no choice but to get out here, because the buttons don’t work and the movie also has an agenda to fulfill.

The apartment is full of creepy old dolls and cobwebs and dim lighting. An old console TV flickers and plays The Lost Boys, which is catnip to Alex. Next to it is a slice of pumpkin pie, and he takes a big old bite of it like a total rube. IT’S SO OBVIOUSLY POISON PIE, ALEX. He conks out and wakes up in the presence of a heavily Cruella’d Krysten Ritter, playing Natacha, a mega-goth witch who looks like she burgled the wardrobe of the touring contortionist for Cradle of Filth: Hair by the Queen of the Damned. Makeup by the Bride of Frankenstein. Nails by the Bride of Chucky. Eccentric demeanor by Not Quite Helena Bonham Carter.

Natacha has demands. Alex will tell her a scary story every night or else she’ll kill him. The stories should have no happy endings, only misery, and trust me, she’s a tough critic to impress. She has a hairless cat named Lenore, who spies on him; the cat can turn invisible, but, as we learn in one gruesome scene, its excrement remains wholly visible. She has another kid-slave in Yasmin (Lydia Jewitt), who I think is the housemaid, although from the looks of things, she could really use one of those long-handled dusters. The kids have the run of the apartment, so is Natacha overconfident, or just stupid? Yes! At least the doors are enchanted to prevent escape. Alex holes up to write his forced-labor stories in the library, which stretches with spiral staircases infinitely upward; he pages through some books and finds handwriting in them, which may be the key to his and Yasmin’s escape. But escape can’t be easy, can it? (It can’t.)

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nightbooks is Goosebumps meets Misery via The Brothers Grimm.

Performance Worth Watching: Fegley is a likeable enough presence even when he’s given a somewhat flimsy character to play — a character who isn’t as compelling as Fegley’s take on the title role in Timmy Failure, which was underrated, a solidly funny kid movie that’s like The Book of Henry, except watchable, and markedly less calamitous.

Memorable Dialogue: “Writers. Always so insecure.” — Natacha perpetuates a stereotype

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: No, Nightbooks is not a Stephen King origin story, although it could be, maybe, if it wasn’t so intentionally aimed at audiences in the double-digit/pre-teen demographic. King surely had more warped stuff happen to him — safe assumption to make, considering he came of age during the Eisenhower administration — than our young scribe protagonist here, who we learn is a social outcast. The kids at school call him Creepshow, which he doesn’t like, although it’s better than being called Tales from the Crypt or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Point being, maybe he should just lean into it, and that’s the moral of the story: Be yourself, and to hell with the haters. “The thing that makes you weird makes them ordinary,” is Yasmine’s wisdom for Alex, and sure, that’s a perfectly fine message for young audiences to hear, although they shouldn’t wholly emulate the boy, since they’d most likely be better off waiting until they’re at least 15 to watch Dead Alive.

Visually, tonally and aesthetically, the film is acceptably boilerplate medium-light scary fodder with a couple of creative-enough medium-low-budget set pieces, some skittery CGI creatures, a scene in which characters are chased through the woods by the frightful beast known as a Raimi Cam, and earnest work from its pair of young principals. Ritter’s performance is too apathetic to really achieve liftoff; it feels reined in despite opportunities to turn this basic witch into a tasty kook. The sloppyplot story somewhat randomly deviates into literally literary Grimmness for the third act, which, as these types of movies always always (always) go, builds to a noisy and hectic climax. It’s perfectly adequate for kids who find Goosebumps too tame and Fear Street too slashy. Keep your expectations modest, and ye shall be modestly entertained.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Nightbooks is like getting Tootsie Rolls in your trick-or-treat bag: It’s no full-size Snickers bar, but neither is it a fistful of rock-hard Pal bubble gum.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Nightbooks on Netflix