‘Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark’ Teaser Is ‘Greatest Hits’ Of Children’s Horror Stories

Academy Award-winner Guillermo Del Toro is producing a new horror adaptation with Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, from director Andre Ovredal. The director of The Autopsy Of Jane Doe adapts the children’s books, written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell, into a feature film, and the new trailer released on CBS Film’s official YouTube page looks terrifying.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was a series of children’s horror books written in 1981, featuring urban legends and folk tales as the basis for scary stories that saw children as the main characters. The books feature an anthology series of stories that range from mythic, supernatural, to completely horror tales meant to frighten and shock. The series featured three books, each containing over 20 separate stories as per an Insider report.

The film adaptation of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark seems to be amalgamating the multiple stories through the plot device of one fictional character, as the creatures from the stories terrorize a small town, and a group of teenage characters, as per the trailer. The film was originally to be produced by Guillermo Del Toro, as well as directed, however, Ovredal was confirmed as being the director in a report by Variety. The horror adaptation from Lionsgate Films and CBS seems to accurately depict the darkness of the original novels.

Unlike the novels, the film version of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark will be one narrative thread with the same characters, told from beginning to end. When speaking at an event to promote the teaser, acclaimed filmmaker, and producer of Scary Stories, Del Toro (The Shape Of Water) discusses how he and his writing team chose which stories from the novel series to include in the film adaptation, as per Entertainment Weekly.

“We did an American Idol with the stories in the writers’ room. We were saying, ‘Which are your favorite?’ We distilled it to the five or six that we like the most. Some of them are told in their entirety, some others are referenced. Those that know the books will see more than people that haven’t read the book… But we basically distilled it to the ones that everybody seems to remember the most. The books obviously have many many more stories, so this could go on and on. But we said, ‘Let’s do greatest hits.'”

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark releases this summer on August 9.