This summer, producer Guillermo del Toro and director André Øvredal are bringing us a feature adaptation of author Alvin Schwartz's very popular book series SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK. Four very quick promos for the film aired last night during the Super Bowl, and each one focuses on a creature or on a moment that fans of the books will be familiar with.
All of the TV spots have been gathered together in the video embedded below. In them you get glimpses of the Pale Lady, the terrifying concept at the center of the story The Red Spot, the Big Toe monster, and Doug Jones as the Jangly Man.
Written by Kevin Hageman, Dan Hageman, Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, and del Toro, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK stars Zoe Colletti as Stella Michaels,
a young girl still haunted by her mother’s disappearance on Halloween night — an incident that she suspects her father knows more about than he lets on. Years later, Stella and her friends are involved in a Halloween prank gone wrong. But are they really at fault, or was it the work of a vengeful spirit — a female ghost who uses her scary stories to come after the teens when they begin to investigate the disappearance of several children?
Colletti's co-stars include Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Abrams, Dean Norris, Kathleen Pollard, Gil Bellows, Lorraine Toussaint, Austin Zajur, and Natalie Ganzhorn.
A newly released official synopsis for the film goes like this:
It's l968 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 tome.
Sean Daniel, Elizabeth Grave, Jason Brown, and J. Miles Dale produced the film alongside del Toro. It was co-produced and co-financed by CBS Films and eOne.
I have never read Schwartz's books, I missed out on those when I was a kid, but these promos make it look like this is going to live up to the "scary" and "dark" parts of the title. It may be primarily aimed at kids, but Øvredal doesn't seem to have held back.
Lionsgate will be releasing SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK on August 9th.