Dark Stories to Survive the Night (France, 2021)

A French portmanteau of five tales plus wrap-around segment, Dark Stories to Survive the Night is cut together from episodes that were originally aired on a French TV series roughly two years earlier. The driving creative forces behind the series and compilation film seem to be directors François Descraques (dir. of The Visitor from the Future [2022 / trailer]) and Guillame Lubrano. They never combine forces on an episode, or at least aren't credited as having done so, but each does direct every other episode and usually co-wrote the given segment as well.

German trailer to

Dark Stories to Survive the Night:

The wrap-around, after an oddly sci-fi and out-of-the-blue opening scene that makes little sense until the closing scene of the movie, concerns MILF Christine (the decidedly not French Kristanna Loken of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003 / trailer], BloodRayne [2005 / trailer], Bounty Killer [2013 / trailer] and Darkness of Man [2024 / trailer]), who is confronted by a murderous, evil puppet and ends up bound to a chair. To buy time and distract the puppet, Christine start telling horror stories, ultimately spinning five tales of varying effectiveness.

Personally, we find the wrap-around the weakest tale of the movie: the acting and direction is more than competent, but the many aspects of the narrative are a tad too cheesy and the cheapness of the staging of the killer puppet — it is never shown moving, just in new positions and with new expressions — sorely undermines the scares. But seeing that they (Seriously!) didn't even bother to hire a real person to play Christine's son asleep in bed — the use of a dummy is a tick too obvious — the project was obviously hampered by a low budget (not that the special effects of later episodes were in any way even half as shabby). The tales vary from scary to funny to suspenseful to tragic, with most almost open-ended despite any given final resolution.

In the first tale, to save her pre-teen son a no-nonsense professional curator (Delphine Chanéac of Splice [2009 / trailer], The Big Black [2011 / trailer], Kickback [2015 / trailer] and Stranger in the Dunes [2016 / trailer]) has to team up with a museum guard (Julien Pestel) to fight human-eating demons that reside in the exhibition paintings. The narrative offers some surprises and good laughs, and is strong enough of a tale to not be completely undermined by the crappy CGI of the demons.

The next story — Spoilers! — of woman jogger in the park, is definitely horrific and tragic, but relies a bit too much on things that don't ring true. For one, contemporary women like the jogger Sophie (Dorylia Calmel of The Bloodettes [2005 / trailer] and Let the Corpses Tan [2017]) probably won't drink out of a bottle of water offered to them from a nice stranger (John Robinson of Something Wicked [2014 / trailer] and Seraphim Falls [2006 / trailer]) without at least first checking whether the seal is broken; secondly, it goes from day to night too quickly and no woman would wait that long in an emptying park, especially if she starts feeling dizzy, for a stranger to come back; thirdly, drugged or not, assuming that she jogs there every day, she proves amazingly incapable of finding the path(s) out of the park; and lastly, despite the horrors of the ghosts, she would have to be simple in the head not to have realized that the water was drugged, so to run so gladly to the guy who gave her the water is beyond belief. 

The third story, one of the best, concerns a man (Sébastien Lalanne) who awakens as a super-powerful zombie and comes to realize that there are some nasty situations that he needs to correct. Opening with a splat, the segment has a lot of on-the-spot humor, interesting characterization, emotional resonance and action, and works its way to a satisfying conclusion that ultimately cannot be described as happy. The next episode, about a frightened young woman (Tiphaine Daviot of Goal of the Dead [2014 / trailer] and Girls with Balls [2018 / trailer]) haunted by a killer jinn, is the scariest and least humorous of the bunch, in contrast to that tale that follows, perhaps the most tightly scripted and humorous and scary and bloody of the five, which is about two young filmmakers who travel to a falling-apart farm to make a documentary about an apparently unhinged man (Dominique Pinon of Diva [1981 / trailer], Delicatessen [1991 / trailer], Dante 01 [2008] and our Short Film of the Month for August, 2016, Le Queloune [2008]) who claims that aliens have anointed him the new messiah.

While some episodes reveal the limitations of their budget more so than others, some are amazing examples of overcoming one's financial limitations. In general, the acting is convincing and the direction tight, and but for the tale about the jogger, the stories remain engaging and as "plausible" as a ghost/zombie/jinn/demon tale might be able to be. The sleaze factor is low, generally lacking in any of the nudity or gore excesses found on either the great portmanteau films of yesterday or today's pay-TV anthology horrors, but as is typical of the genre all episodes work towards and end with an EC Comics-like twist.

If you like portmanteau horror films, you can easily do a lot worse and would have some difficulty doing better. Dark Stories to Survive the Night ticks all the right boxes and makes for a good evening's entertainment; if you like the genre or the format, you should give it a go. And seeing that the movie is all violence and blood and no sex or nudity, it is perfect fodder for today's children in the USA.