'Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark' Trailers: The Classic Children's Horror Collection Comes To Life

If you were a kid in the 1980s or early 1990s, there's a good chance that you encountered the children's book series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Drawing from folklore and urban legends, the book series written by Alvin Schwartz was made all the more terrifying thanks to the inky, twisted illustrations by Stephen Gammell. Now the book series is coming to life in a film adaptation produced by Guillermo del Toro, and the first Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark trailer (or rather a series of mini-trailers) shows us the kind of terror we can expect.

This first teaser takes a cue directly from the original book with a grotesque undead woman looking for her missing big toe that was dug up from a garden. It's one of the more unnerving stories from the book, and that woman looks quite gross.

The next teaser has us raising our eyebrows though, because it features some kind of nasty terror called The Jangly Man. As far as we can tell, this isn't something taken from any of the Scary Stories books, which is a little concerning.

This teaser is taken from the story "The Dream," where another malformed woman creeps down a hallway. In the story, this entity famously says, "This is an evil place. Flee while you can," and she looks just like she does in the book.

Finally, one more teaser from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark comes from "The Red Spot." However, even though it's taken directly from the book, it doesn't quite match up with the rest of the spots that played during the Super Bowl, and it really makes us question just what this movie is going to be like.

There's quite a lot of pressure for this film to deliver the kind of nightmares that terrified children when they read these books so many decades ago. The illustrations were so horrifying that the books were banned in some libraries across the country. Based on this introduction to the movie, we're not sure exactly whether it'll live up to the expectations, but we're still curious.

In addition here's the teaser poster that debuted just before the weekend, with quite the terrifying image:

That unsettling scarecrow is named Harold, and his story is just one of several from the collection of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. In the story, the scarecrow comes to life in front of a pair of cowboys driving a herd of cows through a green pasture in the mountains. The two think they're merely losing their minds a bit, out in the hot sun for so long. But the story ends with one of them meeting a grisly end at the hands of the scarecrow.

For anyone worried that this movie wouldn't be true to the terror of the books, check out the illustration of Harold:

That's pretty damn close, if you ask me. Hopefully director André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Done, Trollhunter) will be just as loyal when it comes to bringing the other horrors from the book to life. It won't be a collection of short stories like The Twilight Zone Movie, but merely an amalgamation of various terrors as a group of young teens who must solve the mystery surrounding sudden and macabre deaths in their small town.

The film stars Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Austin Abrams, Dean Norris, Gil Bellows, Lorraine Toussaint, Austin Zajur, and Natalie Ganzhorn.

Here's the official synopsis fro Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark:

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.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark hits theaters on August 9, 2019.