New Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Trailer Debuts

Get ready to be creeped out in a whole slew of new ways, because the latest trailer for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has officially debuted. On Monday, Lionsgate released the latest trailer for the film, which is inspired by Alvin Schwartz and Steven Gammell’s highly-popular book series of the same name.

The film is directed by André Øvredal (TrollHunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) and is produced by Guillermo del Toro, who was initially brought on to direct the project.

The cast of Scary Stories includes Michael Garza (Wayward Pines, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1), Austin Abrams (Brad’s Status, The Americans), Gabriel Rush (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel), Austin Zajur (Fist Fight, Kidding), Natalie Ganzhorn (Make it Pop, Wet Bum), Zoe Coletti (Annie, Wildlife), Dean Norris (Breaking Bad), Gil Bellows (Patriot), Lorraine Toussaint (Into the Badlands), and Javier Botet (The Conjuring 2).

“I basically was roaming through a bookstore, in San Antonio, Texas,” del Toro confessed in a previous interview. “I was in my early teens, and I came upon this volume that had an irresistible title: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The cover illustration was so creepy, and I started browsing it, and the illustrations got me first, but Alvin Schwartz’s retelling of the tales was incredibly efficient and lean and mean. It really was like having a campfire between those two covers.”

“We did an American Idol with the stories in the writers’ room,” del Toro said of crafting the film. “We were saying, ‘Which are your favorite?’ We distilled it to the five or six that we like the most. Some of them are told in their entirety, some others are referenced. Those that know the books will see more than people that haven’t read the book.… But we basically distilled it to the ones that everybody seems to remember the most. The books obviously have many many more stories, so this could go on and on. But we said, ‘Let’s do greatest hits.’”

The movie’s synopsis reads, “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.”

What do you think of the latest look at Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark will debut on August 9th.