Guillermo del Toro on his favorite Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark monster

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Director André Øvredal and producer Guillermo del Toro‘s upcoming adaptation of Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” will bring many of our childhood nightmares to life, and for del Toro, it’s been a long time coming.

“They had the simplicity of campfire stories,” del Toro told Entertainment Weekly. “They had that flavor of folklore and oral narrative, with a great sense of setup and punchline.” Although the series seems ripe for an anthology format, Guillermo del Toro instead conceived of a unified story with a framing narrative which follows a group of kids as they each encounter a different Scary Stories monster based on their greatest fear. There are plenty of terrifying monsters in those original stories, but both Guillermo del Toro and André Øvredal have the same favourite – The Pale Lady. “She embodies what’s so fun about the stories, a cheeky innocence where underneath there’s something so grave and scary,” Øvredal said. Del Toro also admitted that The Pale Lady was also the most challenging character to translate from page to screen. “Gammell draws these very ephemeral images, and we tried to translate them into 3D,” del Toro said. “I actually recruited the best sculptors I know, who are Mike Hill and Norman Cabrera, and went to one of the best physical-effects makeup companies, Spectral Motion, and from there we went and really honored the Gammell drawings. We did several of the characters in the book. In each instance we would say, ‘Does it look and feel like the character on the page?’ Once you see them in movement in the film, they come across exactly as close as you can get to a Gammell drawing come alive.“

The official synopsis for SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK:

It’s 1968 in America. Change is blowing in the wind…but seemingly far removed from the unrest in the cities is the small town of Mill Valley where for generations, the shadow of the Bellows family has loomed large. It is in their mansion on the edge of town that Sarah, a young girl with horrible secrets, turned her tortured life into a series of scary stories, written in a book that has transcended time—stories that have a way of becoming all too real for a group of teenagers who discover Sarah’s terrifying home.

SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK will hit theaters on August 9, 2019.