Metacritic reviews

Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.

Ghost Stories is a witty and well-crafted love letter to old-school horror tropes.

Underneath the entertaining horror, this is ultimately a story of the toxic trappings of masculinity; a world in which keeping a stiff upper lip and resolutely burying your demons can summon the most terrifying of consequences.

Bone-chillingly told and beautifully made, Ghost Stories is an expert twist on an evergreen genre.

Not quite a terrifying thrill-ride, Ghost Stories is a creepy, disturbing ghost train with a beefier backbone than its source material, trading on tropes but still making your skin itch.

Its world is weirdly familiar and yet alien. It’s also darn scary.

There’s the phantom of a psychothriller for the ages inside “Ghost Stories” that never quite fights its way out of the film’s tightly structured creepshow homage, but the goosebumps it raises are real, and honestly earned.

There’s still a lot of pleasure to be had here, whether from digging your fingernails into the armrest early on, to Freeman’s sly comic performance later.

In setting their play to film, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman decide where we look. Any magician would be jealous of that power. But it puts everything at a remove, trapping you in your own head.

Ghost Stories works best as an exercise in nostalgia. Those seeking hardcore, modern-day scares will be disappointed.