'Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark' Jangly Man Trailer Hopes To Scare Folks Before Film's August Release

We’re getting close to seeing what producer Guillermo del Toro and company have in store for the anticipated “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” adaption, and a new trailer has us even more intrigued.

Riding off the wave of kids-versus-horror in a small town trope that’s been revived with “Stranger Things” and the “It” adaptation, del Toro and director André Øvredal (“Troll Hunter“) are bringing Alvin Schwartz‘s beloved kid-oriented scary stories to life, and it looks like some of the more creepy PG-13 footage we’ve seen in some time.

We get a look at everyone’s favorite pumpkin patch terror Harold the Snowman, the terrifying Pale Lady, plenty of horrified youths and that poor girl who has a spider living in her cheek. Everything seems calibrated to scare (though, not *that* much, given the rating), and every young moviegoer deserves an opportunity to scale themselves into more scary material. Really, this is a perfect companion piece to “Stranger Things” and “It,” revivals of the 80s Amblin approach to horror that gave entire generations nightmares they could handle.

Familiar faces to pop up in this are Dean Norris (“Breaking Bad“), Lorraine Toussaint (“Middle of Nowhere“), Gil Bellows (“The Shawshank Redemption“) and Austin Abrams (“The Walking Dead“).

Time will tell if “Scary Stories” can find the right audience to haunt, as it’s squared off right in the heels of “Hobbs and Shaw” and a week or so before another one of those “47 Meters Down” movies. It’ll also come a month before Pennywise the Clown returns in “It: Chapter Two.” It’ll be a bit of an uphill climb, with those involved banking on the nostalgia for the books to come through, as well as the crowd who remembers those exact, memorable Super Bowl commercials from February.

We have a hunch the time is just right for this film to be a potential sleeper hit, and that it could forge its own path in the genre. We’ll know soon enough how it scares and if people care when it opens August 9. Here’s the new poster and check out the most recent trailer while you’re here.