The idea of a movie based on Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark has always seemed a little terrifying, at least to people who grew up with the original art by Stephen Gammell (see above). But those scaredy cats have always been able to calm their fears by telling themselves that no movie could possibly capture how unnerving those pictures are. Surely, any movie adaptation would just have standard, computer-generated spookiness that would fall way short of the nightmare fuel that Scary Stories readers grew up with. After all what director would not only have the eye for picking up on what made those pictures so horrifying in the first place, but also the skill to effectively recreate them? Well, one director in particular does, and now he’s actually helping to develop the Scary Stories adaptation.
That director is Guillermo del Toro, and Deadline says he’s even in talks to potentially direct Scary Stories as well. As it turns out, del Toro is a big fan of Gammell’s original art and owns 10 of the original illustrations that Gammell made for the books, making him one of the few people in history who could actually glance at the Scary Stories art and not immediately look away out of fear of being scared to death. Of course, del Toro is also an infamously busy guy, and Deadline notes that he already has a ton of projects in the works that will probably never come out, so there’s a good chance the world will be spared from having to see del Toro bring any of the Scary Stories pictures to life. Unless he already has…and there’s a killer scarecrow on your roof right now waiting to rip off your skin.