Last summer, spooky season came early when André Øvredal’s adaptation of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark hit theaters. The PG-13 film may not have made the waves of 2019’s other best horror offerings, such as Jordan Peele’s Us or IT Chapter 2, but it quietly made some good money and impressed fans and critics alike.
The creatives behind Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark will now return for a sequel once again based on Alvin Schwartz’s iconic short story collections. André Øvredal is coming back to direct, Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman will write the script, and Guillermo del Toro will write the film’s screen story. There's no word yet if del Toro is also on board as a producer again yet, per THR.
Alvin Schwartz wrote three collections of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, each containing 25-29 tales, so there’s certainly plenty of material for this sequel to draw upon. The 2019 film adapted “The Haunted House” and “The Big Toe” from the first collection published in 1981, and “The Red Spot,” “Harold” and “The Dream” from 1991’s third collection.
Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was made on a budget of $25 million and scored $105.8 million worldwide in August against releases such as Dora and the Lost City of Gold, The Kitchen and The Art of Racing in the Rain. It opened at No. 2 below Hobbs & Shaw’s massive box office success.
André Øvredal is fairly new to the scene, directing small films 2010’s Trollhunter and 2016’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe before Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. The Hageman brothers have previously written the stories for The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Ninjago Movie and the screenplay for the upcoming Croods 2.
Guillermo del Toro’s presence on the project certainly will continue to give the franchise credibility, especially since Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was the filmmaker's first horror project with his name on it since winning Best Director and Best Picture for 2017’s The Shape of Water. Del Toro is busy working on his Pinocchio adaptation, the noir remake Nightmare Alley and a werewolf western.
Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was highly praised equally by critics and audiences. CinemaBlend’s own Eric Eisenberg gave the movie 4 out of 5 stars in his review and its overall Rotten Tomatoes score was 78%. Audiences gave the film 72% on RT, but it suffered a “C” CinemaScore.
There’s a lot of options written between the pages of Alvin Schwartz’s collections for chilling stories for Paramount to adapt in its Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, such as “The Girl Who Stood On A Grace,” “Sam’s New Pet” and these other stories we’d like to see come to the big screen. Which one’s would you like to see? Sound off in the comments below.
