In Andre Ovredal’s movie adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the book itself is an actual character in the film. A scene screened for reporters last night showed the book scrawling the story “The Big Toe” in blood red letters as Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) frantically tried to read it to Auggie (Gabriel Rush) to warn him.
The letters scrolled by pretty fast. The actors read the important lines out loud, but you might need to freeze frame the Blu-ray if you’re interested in reading the full text. Ovredal told Bloody-Disgusting that the visual effects of the self-writing book are still a work-in-progress at this time.
“It’s still not quite done,” Ovredal told us. “We’re still tweaking details in the VFX. It depends on each shot. Sometimes we’re meant to read it. Other times the characters are actually saying it as we read it. So it’s going to be on a shot by shot [basis] whether it should be readable or if it should just be like oh, it’s happening. In a couple of those shots, it’s supposed to be oh my God, it’s just going on and on and on.”
The words on the page are sure to come in part from the actual Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books by writer Alvin Schwartz. However, since this is an adaptation, some of the words will have to be tailored to the stories the movie is telling.
“It’s a balance,” Ovredal explained. “It’s based on the stories but we had to tweak them a little bit to match the specifics of our story. Anyway, they’re urban tales so even though they’re in the books, they are urban tales so they’re actually already adapted stories.”
In the film, the book is credited to Sarah Bellows, an infamous local legend. Stella essentially opens Pandora’s Box, or in this case Sarah’s Book. The book, well, it exploits the deepest, darkest fears of those who read it. They’re not reading the book, as the trailer notes. It’s reading them.
“As you saw, the stories start writing themselves,” Colletti said. “It’s this folklore in the town that all kids knew these stories and knew about Sara Bellows whose book it actually is. My character is actually an avid horror film lover and that’s why I was so intrigued with going and finding this book and doing this. It’s more to find out how that it’s actually happening. What the book’s writing is what happens to each person and each person has a story in the book.”
Whenever the book is writing itself in real time, that’s obviously a digital effect. Other scenes could be accomplished via analog methods.
“There were ones with different stages of how much writing was on the pages and obviously when it’s actually writing itself, it was put in afterwards,” Colletti said.
Colletti also said they went through 30 different versions of the physical book. Costar Michael Garza gave us some hints about what the book endures over the course of all the horror stories.
“Those books went through a lot: fire, rain, throwing, a lot,” Garza told us.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark opens August 9.
