Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Short description
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark takes place in Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, on Halloween night in 1968. A group of teenagers, among them Stella Nicholls, plays a prank on a school bully and then breaks into an abandoned house that once belonged to the Bellows family, a powerful local clan with a troubled past. Inside, they find a book of frightening tales, and the stories begin to come true around them, forcing the friends to confront the things they fear most while deaths mount in their small town. The film draws on Alvin Schwartz's collections of folk horror for young readers. Guillermo del Toro produced and shares story credit, while Dan and Kevin Hageman wrote the screenplay. André Øvredal directed, following Troll Hunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and the film sits between those earlier features and the later Mortal and The Last Voyage of the Demeter in his filmography. Zoe Colletti leads a cast that includes Dean Norris, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Gil Bellows and Natalie Ganzhorn, with 38 credited performers and 130 credited crew members. Made for about 25 million dollars, it earned roughly 105 million worldwide, a strong return. On IMDb it holds 6.2 from around 92,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.5 from about 2,930 votes. A critics' rating of 6.5 from 237 reviews puts professional response close to the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Mike Elizalde, Norman Cabrera, and the other special effects artists decided that Harold the scarecrow would be constructed from composite parts (a rotting pumpkin for a belly and a wooden frame for a skeleton). It was Cabrera who suggested using an old rubber mask that had been lying in the sun and dried out for a long time as Harold's face.
- The Bellows family home was filmed in the small town of Petrolia in the southwestern part of Ontario province.
- Creating the Pale Lady was no easy feat. The costume for this character was worn by Mark Steger, who is a veteran of the horror genre (and previously worked at Spectral Motion, a company specializing in creating cinematic monsters through animatronics, makeup, costumes, and so on). Among other things, Steger played the Demogorgon in the first season of 'Stranger Things'. Mike Elizalde, a special effects specialist, later spoke about the difficulties with the creature's eyes, which were positioned too far apart.
- CBS Films acquired the rights to adapt the book series in 2015. Five years later, it was announced that Guillermo del Toro would be one of the screenwriters and producers of the film adaptation. Del Toro himself decided to include some of the monsters in the script.
- A film adaptation of the book series of the same name by Alvin Schwartz, with illustrations by Steven Gammell. The series was published in the 1980s.
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