Staying true to the kid-friendly spirit of the books, director André Øvredal and producer Guillermo del Toro have received the PG-13 rating they were aiming for with their Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which will release next month.
We've learned today that the MPAA rated the adaptation PG-13 for: "Terror/violence, disturbing images, thematic elements, language including racial epithets, and brief sexual references."
Del Toro had recently said at an event, "We wanted to make a family adventure. I want this to be a nice family horror film. A lot of movies simplify kids and make them cute, skateboarding dudes who say one-liners and never get killed. In my movies, kids do die. They are more frail, but at the same, more complex, and they see that darkness, and that extends to this movie."
"There’s no blood in this movie,” Øvredal had noted. "We didn’t wanna go too young, but we wanted to honor the fact that the books are for a younger audience. We wanted to honor the material and the stories."
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark follows a group of teens who must solve the mystery surrounding a wave of spectacularly horrific deaths in their small town.
"It’s l968 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."
The film is directed by Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe) from a screenplay by Daniel Hageman, Kevin Hageman and del Toro, and is based on the bestselling trilogy of books by Alvin Schwartz. The film's cast includes Dean Norris, Gil Bellows, Lorraine Toussaint, Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Austin Abrams, Gabriel Rush, Austin Zajur and Natalie Ganzhorn.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is also being produced by Sean Daniel and Jason Brown of Hivemind along with Academy Award-winner J. Miles Dale and Elizabeth Grave.
The nightmarish stories come to life on August 9th, 2019.
