Big Fish writer John August will bravely tackle Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

While Saw writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan seem to have a fondness for gruesome death traps, apparently they can’t quite handle the unmitigated horror of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark—the scariest book trilogy of all time for kids who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Dunstan and Melton were originally supposed to write a movie adaptation of the books for CBS films, but they’ve now left the project. Presumably, it’s because they started having nightmares about a scarecrow named Harold walking around on their roof and ripping off their skin. Those books are pretty messed up.

According to Deadline, the two have been replaced by Big Fish and Frankenweenie writer John August. That earlier version of the film reportedly would’ve focused on a group of kids saving their neighborhood from scary things, but Deadline says August’s version will “go back to the source material.” Hopefully, that means we’ll finally get a big-screen version of that story about the girl with spider eggs in her face. The movie could be a horror anthology like V/H/S, only, you know, way scarier than any other scary movie has ever been. Assuming it takes some kind of visual inspiration from the original Stephen Gammell art, of course, which you can see an example of up above.