Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark director André Øvredal on horror, anticipation and smuggling illegal VHS tapes

Bad things are lurking in the first big screen adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s children’s horror anthology book series Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. We talk to director André Øvredal to find out more…

In the age of anthologies, this year’s big summer horror comes in the form of Lionsgate’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, based on Alvin Schwartz’s short story book collection of the same name. 2016’s The Autopsy Of Jane Doe director André Øvredal is helming the project, which follows a group of teenagers from the small town of Mill Valley as they come across a book hidden in a mansion on the edge of town. Little do they know, the book as written by a young girl called Sarah with horrible secrets who turned the true events of her tortured life into a book of scary stories, which begin to come real for the group of kids.

Though Jane Doe was his first big-screen venture into horror filmmaking, Øvredal has always been a huge fan of the genre. “I grew up as a child of the VHS generation,” he tells us. “It’s been my favourite genre as I’ve grown up, I was watching all kinds of horror.”

Raised in Norway, horror films were sometimes hard to come by for Øvredal. With strict film guidelines in place, many of his favourites were banned in his home country, so his family would sometimes obtain horror films on the sly during visits to England. “Evil Dead, I think, was illegal in Norway,” he says, “and I remember [my family got me a copy] and it was the highlight of my life at that time.”

Jane Doe received critical praise upon its release, but the director is trying something new with Scary Stories. “Jane Doe is a very minimalist film, and Scary Stories is in some ways a maximalist film,” he explains. “It’s got a specific time period, it’s got an epic tone in a way, it’s a journey for these characters on a whole different level. So it’s been a great experience to be able to broaden out from minimalism to making something with a much broader scope, but still keep it a horror movie.”

However, some of Øvredal’s previous horror’s influence leaks into Scary Stories, namely the way in which he constructs suspense. “I like to keep people guessing or waiting,” he says. “I love anticipation. I think it’s sometimes more fun than the actual scare. I love playing with the camera and editing and pacing and music and all that stuff. I think it will show up, I think you’ll be able to tell that it’s the same director behind Jane Doe.”

With Scary Stories being aimed at a slightly younger audience than most horror films, Øvredal wanted to keep the focus more on the suspenseful side of the genre and less on the grotesque. “I think the movie will be perceived as scary — it definitely has been at test screenings — so I don’t think it’s tougher being PG-13,” he explains. “A lot of great horror movies have been PG-13. I think Poltergeist was PG in its day. So I think it’s tone… The film doesn’t have an evil tone. We’re not out to torture the audience. We’re out to give them a fun time.”

With a cast made up mostly of teenagers and young adults, many of the film’s stars are unknowns, and actors with only a handful of film credits to their names. Zoe Colletti leads the cast as Stella Nicholls, the girl who finds the book of Scary Stories.

“Some [of the actors] have quite a bit of experience, and others have less, but they’ve all been chosen for their personality, for what they bring to the characters,” Øvredal tells us. They really helped me shape the characters into who they are. They’re so natural and giving to work — they seem to have a lot of faith, sometimes I’m shocked at how much faith they have after I’ve given extremely precise direction. I think there is some definite star potential in several of these actors. To me, they’re amazing, which is something that is consistently there. [They listen to feedback] and their performances are so great. So I think the audience will see a lot from them, especially from Zoe Colletti, the lead. She’s an amazing actress, and we will see a lot of her, that’s for sure.”

Scary Stories kicks off in 1968 in America, during a very tense era in the world. With wars, revolutions, assassinations and loads of other dramatic events happening all around the globe, people were on edge most of the time.

“There was general turbulence with things that were going on in the background of our lives,” says the director. “That kind of feeling of not working in a society where everything is under control. I thought it would be a fascinating thing to play with. I never thought in my life that I would make a period movie, that wasn’t a particular thing for me, and then suddenly they presented me with a screenplay with 1968 as the time period. We had amazing production designers and costume designers, and people who really know this era, and it was so much fun to go into this and create it. Even seeing how things repeat themselves, like the costumes, seeing what was modern then compared to what’s modern now, it’s fascinating, how everything goes in circles.”

One of Scary Stories’ biggest pulls is the fact that the brilliant Guillermo del Toro (The Shape Of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth) has been aboard from the start. The filmmaker developed the story with Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, and has stayed on to produce alongside Sean Daniel, Jason F Brown, Elizabeth Grave and his The Shape Of Water colleague J Miles Dale. It sounds as though GDT was a selling point for Øvredal too, who hadn’t even heard of the Scary Stories book series before the script for the film landed on his desk. 

“Guillermo’s involvement was an amazing thing, to be able to work with maybe the greatest living director at the moment and definitely of our generation, to be able to be part of his monster universe,” says Øvredal. “I was thinking about that while we were finishing up the movie, in a way I’m a part of Guillermo’s monster universe. That’s quite an unbelievable thing to be.”

During production, del Toro was always fighting in Øvredal’s corner. “He’s so warm and so welcoming and so giving, and he was so protective of the way I wanted to make the movie. Even J Miles Dale and Sean Daniel, who have done a tonne of big movies, wonderful movies, classic movies, really protected Scary Stories throughout the process to make sure that I had every resource that they could possibly give me. It’s been amazing. Especially Guillermo, who knows what kind of support a director actually needs… He made sure that I would never be stepped on by anybody. He told me, ‘This is your movie and you will do the movie you want, and I’ll just be there to support you.’ He really did that, the whole time. He gave me a tonne of creative advice, and he basically said you can take it or leave it. But, you know, this is my story. He’s been extremely helpful will everything from the effects and the creatures to the design, all that stuff has been an amazing collaboration, and so much knowledge that I don’t have, but am gaining. And walking into it, it was a great thing to have a person who was in a way a mentor to me.”

Though Øvredal was commanding the ship, he admits that del Toro’s influence is clear throughout the film. “From the script to the designs of creatures, there’s so many elements of him in this for sure, and I think people will be able to recognise them. I do believe an interesting thing is that I have a realist approach and he has a fantastical approach, and I think there’s an interesting balance between those two elements, and that we’ve created something hopefully unique.”

Del Toro has been deeply involved throughout, says Øvredal, especially during the editing process. The pair worked closely with a whole team of studio producers, figuring out the tempo of the film and realising the horror film that Øvredal wanted to create. “Nobody knows as much about filmmaking as Guillermo,” says Øvredal. “I’ve been working with him for the best part of a year, and I definitely think I’ve come out the other side a better director.”

Though del Toro is a huge draw in anybody’s eyes, the script also caught Øvredal’s attention. Upon reading it for the first time he fell in love with it instantly. “I would never direct a movie without loving the screenplay,” he tells us. As soon as he finished it, he was struck with a feeling that he could really make the film his own.

“That’s such a great feeling because it’s so hard to find scripts that you just instantly, emotionally and professionally connect with,” he continues. “I understood the kids, I understood the tone, I understood everything. I have my own version of it, obviously, but I was desperate to make it as soon as I read it. I was so happy knowing that Guillermo [and the producers] also liked me and Jane Doe. I felt really protected. There’s been a team of people around me, and I’ve been supported for the entire process. It’s my first kind of Hollywood movie and we’ve all heard the horror stories of how badly they can go, but I really felt to welcome by all these people. They believed in my vision of it. That’s been a big part of the reason I dared to do it.”

This article first appeared in SciFiNow issue 161. 

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is in cinemas from 23 August. Get all the latest horror news with every issue of SciFiNow.