'Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark' Trailer Introduces You To The Jangly Man

Things get jangly in this new Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark trailer. The film from producer Guillermo del Toro and director André Øvredal brings the traumatizing horror stories for Young Adults to life – and from the looks of things, the movie is going to be plenty scary. The trailer below highlights some monstrosity called the Jangly Man and finally reveals what this character's connection is to the original books.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has been teasing the appearance of a character called the Jangly Man once its marketing began – and I've been puzzled. There's no such character in any of the Scary Stories books. I wondered: Why make up a new character when there are so many memorable ghosts and ghouls from the books? This trailer gives me an answer. While the name is new, the character is obviously inspired by the story "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!" In that tale of terror, a boy and his dog go to a haunted house, because that's what kids do in these stories. Once there, the boy hears a spooky voice singing "Me tie dough-ty walker." At which point, the boy's dog sings back: "Lynchee kinchy colly molly dingo dingo." Yeah, it's a weird story, folks. Anyway, eventually, a bloody head falls down the chimney, causing the dog to die of fright. In the trailer above, we see a dog looking at a chimney, and then the Jangly Man comes tumbling down. Thankfully, the dog in the trailer runs away, alive and well. Don't you dare kill off that dog, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

I remain cautiously optimistic about this film. I think a lot of the dialogue in the trailers – "You don't read the book, the book reads you!" – is pretty terrible. I also think the power of the Scary Stories books was primarily in the drippy, nightmarish artwork by Stephen Gammell, and that's impossible to translate to the big screen in live-action. Nonetheless, I'm impressed at how disturbing this movie looks. It really does look as if it's going to traumatize young audiences everywhere, and I support that.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark opens August 9.

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.