Debut Trailer for ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ Will Scare the Pants Off You (VIDEO)

If you were a child of the 80s—and presumably the early 90s—chances are you owned a copy of the book "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." Full of macabre and twisted tales, the book kept many a pre-teen up all night terrified by the exacting details of body decomposition.

Now, a whole new generation of children can be terrified by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark thanks to a new film adaptation from producer Guillermo Del Toro. Norwegian director André Øvredal is at the helm, and if you've seen his last two films, Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, then you know he's got an equally twisted sensibility that will suit the material quite nicely.

The film is a period piece set in the 1960s, which is an interesting choice that makes sense when you consider that many of the stories in the book were set in the distant past. The film's official logline fills in some of the details on the framing device they're using for this anthology film...

“It’s 1968 in America. Change is blowing in the wind…but seemingly far removed from the unrest in the cities is the small town of Mill Valley where for generations, the shadow of the Bellows family has loomed large. It is in their mansion on the edge of town that Sarah, a young girl with horrible secrets, turned her tortured life into a series of scary stories, written in a book that has transcended time—stories that have a way of becoming all too real for a group of teenagers who discover Sarah’s terrifying tome.”

I doubt this will be marketed to the Goosebumps audience, as these are slightly darker and more disturbing stories, so I would expect this to get a PG-13 rating probably. Get ready to stay up all night when Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark hits theaters on August 9.