Watch the First Trailer for "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark"
If you ever spent a sleepover reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with your friends, you know just how haunting that series was. From the terrifying illustrations to the eerie tales themselves, the three books were guaranteed to leave you with nightmares — if you managed to sleep at all. Now, the frightening series from our elementary school days is being turned into a movie, and from the looks of the first trailer, we are in for a truly horrific trip down memory lane.
Where Alvin Schwartz’s books were divided into 20+ individual stories each, the film version of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark seems like it will weave many of the tales together with one nightmarish arc. According to the trailer, the movie will center around a group of friends who stumble upon a creepy book belonging to a mysterious girl named Sarah. Upon opening the book, the friends unknowingly release a storm of evil upon their community in the form of the scariest creatures from Schwartz's iconic series, with a noticeable homage to Stephen Gammell’s original bone-chilling illustrations. As noted during an especially eerie line of dialogue: “You don’t read the book, the book reads you.” (OK I could have told them that; rule number one of any horror movie: You find a demonic-looking book, you keep the damn thing closed.)
With a team of storytellers including producer Guillermo del Toro and director André Øvredal, it’s clear that Scary Stories… is not going to disappoint in the horror department. According to Del Toro, the film will highlight five or six of the series’ “greatest hits,” including The Big Toe, The Dream, and The Red Spot (because I really needed another reason to stress out about spiders). “The beauty about the book is that each story is self-contained, but that’s the nightmare of adapting it and making it into a film,” the producer recently explained, adding that people who remember the books well will recognize details that other viewers may not.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is slated to hit theaters on August 9, so there’s plenty of time to dust off the OG books and prepare for the inevitable recurring nightmares.
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