Released last fall—when our understanding of what was, and was not, especially scary was, admittedly, in some small need of calibration—André Øvredal’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was a modest success, both critically, and at the box office. Our own A.A. Dowd praised the film for its balance of effective scares against its mindfully observed PG-13 rating, creating a set of horror tales that parents could trust their teens with, without delivering something that was actually toothless in the process.
Now THR reports that Øvredal is coming back for a second stab at Alvin Schwartz’s three-volume series of kids’ horror anthologies. Also returning: Guillermo Del Toro, who shepherded the original Scary Stories to the screen, and who’ll be writing the new movie’s story, while Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman are coming back to pen the actual script.
There’s no word yet on which of the iconic spooky stories the movie will tackle; the first film adapted classics like “Harold,” “The Big Toe,” and go-to nightmare inducer “The Red Spot,” but there are plenty more stories where those came from. There’s also no word on when production might start, obviously, on account of the even scarier story we currently find ourselves trapped within.