If you grew up during the '80s and the '90s, it's likely that Stephen Gammell's eerie illustrations for Alvin Schwartz's "Scary Scories to Tell In the Dark" series haunted your childhood dreams, and now Deadline reports that CBS has accepted a pitch to adapt the books into a feature film.
Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, writers of the last four "Saw" films, plan to incorporate Gammell's illustrations somehow while turning Schwartz's spooky stories into a movie about outcast kids who work to save their town from nightmares that come to life, according to the Huffington Post.
Schwartz's scary tales, like "Harold" and "The Big Toe," which were part of a three-book series published between 1981 and 1991, were themselves adapted from urban legends and folklore from various cultures.
There is no word yet on whether or not the new illustrations (which created quite a bit of contention, according to HuffPost) as part of the series' 30th-year anniversary edition in 2011 will be part of the film, though seeing as many fans of the classic series denounced them as "ruining" the dreamlike eeriness of the originals, they will likely be left out. Many fans, after all, have said that Gammell's artwork is what made the books so particularly scary in the first place.
"Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark," "More Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (1984)" and "Scary Stories 3: More Tales To Chill Your Bones (1991)" sold more than 7 million copies worldwide.
