This past week, Daily Dead was in attendance at a special event celebrating the launch of the newly released trailer for the upcoming Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark film adaptation, which is being produced by Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro and directed by the brilliant André Øvredal (here’s a friendly reminder that if you have somehow not seen Trollhunter or The Autopsy of Jane Doe, both films are very much worth your time).
Earlier this year, we saw a few teaser videos which gave us an inkling as to which of the Alvin Schwartz tales we’d see in the film, including “The Big Toe,” “The Dream,” “The Red Spot,” and “Harold” of course making some appearances in the marketing as well. During the presentation, Øvredal confirmed that the Scary Stories movie will not be an anthology, and that they’ve come up with a fun way to incorporate all the different stories into one cohesive narrative set in 1968.
For del Toro, his fascination with the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series began decades ago. “I basically was roaming through a bookstore in San Antonio, Texas. I was in my early teens, and I came upon this volume that had an irresistible title, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The color illustration was so creepy and I started browsing it, and the illustrations grabbed me first. But Alvin Schwartz's retelling of the tales was incredibly efficient, lean, and mean. It really was like having a campfire between those two covers.”
“I think the beauty of these books is that each story is contained. But that is the nightmare of adapting it and making it into a film, too. So I had to come up with a concept that encompasses the theme. And what we did is, we tried to find a period of time in which stories affected everyone, everywhere, as humans, what was the US as a nation at that moment, and we started to very carefully lay down the pieces to make it thematically relevant to the stories we were telling.”
“Then, the challenge was to find the filmmaker that could do this," del Toro continued. "Now, when I produce, I'm in the corner, but the guy getting the punches is the director. I am there with the water and the mouth guard, and saying, ‘You are doing great, Rocky, don't worry! Mr. T is not going to take you!’ So, I have to go with somebody that I greatly admired, and it just so happened that André and I had been communicating through Twitter when he was doing Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, which I was praising as much as I could through Twitter.”
“We started corresponding and I said, ‘Well, he would be the ideal guy. I am sure he is busy, though, I am sure his accent is terrible [laughs], but he would be the ideal guy.’ So, he was the one and only filmmaker we approached. And fortunately for me, he accepted,” del Toro added.
For Øvredal, he had to familiarize himself rather quickly with the world of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. “I didn't know anything about these books when I got the screenplay. I had never heard of them because they were never released in Norway. But I just fell in love with the screenplay that you and Kevin [Hageman] and Don [Hageman] had created. It was just this Amblin-esque scary movie set in a period that was so exciting, and it was just a unique opportunity to create both a fascinating image of America in the ’60s as well as a really wonderful story about these characters you'll get to see a little bit of on the screen here, and with just amazing monsters based on a book series that was so beloved in Northern America, especially.”
“It was such a wonderful challenge as a director to have to make a movie that lives up to the expectations of both Guillermo, but also the entire community of people who grew up with these books. And I'm just in awe of being able to work with Guillermo—it's been a pleasure from the moment we started tweeting until today. I have learned so much from you, I've learned so much about filmmaking from a storytelling point of view—everything. It's just been an amazing experience for me.”
One thing that del Toro emphasized during the presentation for those of us in attendance at the Scary Stories event was that the film is definitely aiming for a PG-13 rating, making it the perfect gateway horror for younger viewers, and a great genre excursion where generations of Scary Stories fans can get something out of this adaptation. “The anticipated rating is PG-13. I wanted to have standees that said, ‘You have to be this tall to see this movie,’ but somebody beat us to it, so what can we do [laughs]? But the idea is the books are a favorite among young readers, and I think that there are two or three generations of parents that know the books, too. So, it's really going to be a ride, but there is a safety bar in it.”
After the presentation had concluded, Daily Dead spoke with producer Sean Daniel, who discussed the film’s intended PG-13 rating, saying that he was hoping to push the film’s material as far as they possibly could with the restrictive rating, similar to how they approached The Mummy back in 1999, which is good news all around.
Look for more on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in the coming months!
Photos by Heather Wixson:
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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