Guillermo Del Toro Reveals What Scary Story Got Him Hooked on the Original Series

Just like every superhero has an origin story, every filmmaker adapting a beloved piece of IP has that first moment when they’re caught with the electricity of the thing and fall in love with it for the first time. In a perfect world, it’s that electricity that carries through to the finished product, making it self-evidently the result of a fan’s mind and exciting to the people who love the original.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, recently adapted to film from executive producer and evergreen geek favorite Guillermo del Toro, has an added wrinkle in that it is an anthology of short stories rather than a single novel or series of novels. So, like the recent Goosebumps movies, the idea was always that multiple stories would make their way into the world of the film, but at some point, somebody had to make some decisions as to what. That likely involved some going back over old stories and figuring out which ones were too iconic to lose or too ambitious to do within their time constraints. So what were their favorites?

“For me, ‘The Dream,’” del Toro told ComicBook.com. “[One that] made into the movie, ‘The Dream.’ Everybody loves ‘Harold,’ and ‘Big Dome’ always comes to mind. So those are there, but ‘Ribbon’ also was one of the ones that I wanted to do.”

Turning to director Andre Øvredal, del Toro asked, “You were ‘High Beams,’ right?”

Øvredal replied, “Right, and ‘Me Tie Dough-ty Walker’ is a fun one.”

Set in 1968, two years after “Season of the Witch” was released, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark takes place in 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 is in theaters now.