Last night, CBS Films and Guillermo del Toro invited press to watch some early footage from this summer’s adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, from director Andre Ovredal. The scene they presented showcased their rendition of The Big Toe story. Auggie Hilderbrandt (Gabriel Rush) eats some leftover stew from the fridge. What he doesn’t know is this stew…. IS EVILLLLLLLLLL!
The other kids are in another house warning Auggie on walkie talkies (set in 1968, there are no cell phones in Scary Stories). The pages of a hardbound copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark start scribbling in blood red the tale of the spirit missing his big toe. The book is a little ahead of Auggie, so when Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) warns him of the voice saying, “Who took my big toe?” he doesn’t hear it yet.
A scary meatball ominously bubbles up to the surface of Auggie’s stew. Stella warns him not to eat anything, especially if he doesn’t know where it came from. “Someone made it,” Auggie trusts. Sure enough, that big toe does rise to the surface and ends up on Auggie’s spoon. When he finally realizes what he’s eaten, he spits it out and some extra body parts spill out of the stew too.
“Well, they didn’t taste good,” Rush told Bloody-Disgusting after the presentation. “The toe itself is made of a hard plastic type deal. It’s also much larger. Maybe I just felt that way having to put it in my mouth, but it was a big, big boy. It filled the entire spoon pretty much but the way it plays I think it comes across good proportionally. It was pretty stiff. I didn’t want to chomp down on it.”
Now a believer, Auggie runs to his bedroom and hides under the bed, as the monster staggers around the corner. Closeups on the monster’s feet eventually reveal the missing toe, with bone sticking out of the hole. There’s a cool angle from under the bed with Auggie, a tough shot to execute.
“That’s a very difficult shot and the bed was limited space,” Rush told us. “We try to make everything as accurate to the actual shot as possible but that was a tough sequence to film there. Javier Botet who plays the monster of The Big Toe story was just so on it the entire time, made it much easier for me. So I’m very thankful for him.”
The scene climaxes with a good shot of Auggie getting pulled back under the bed, scratching his nails on the floor as he can’t hold tight enough.
“They’re not telling me to dig in and just let ‘em rip,” Rush said. “That’s mostly post. I’m not actually dragging through the floor and even if I did, you probably wouldn’t see that level of enunciation. That’s mainly just about trying to get the right arching and the resistance, trying to make that appear real.”
That seems like a pretty self-contained adaptation of The Big Toe. Ovredal and del Toro confirmed that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is not an anthology. It’s a single narrative in which several of these stories come true for the characters. Rush said the Big Toe scene we saw started a little bit in the middle. There’s still a good bit of set up to see.
“There’s a little bit more at the beginning of it leading up into it contextually,” Rush said. “That’s pretty much the whole shebang.”
Ovredal told us that the other stories in Scary Stories are incorporated more sparingly into the main plot. “This is probably maybe the one that’s the most incorporated,” Ovredal said. “Some of the other ones, we’ve tweaked it a little bit. They are weaved into our stories. It’s not really the complete stories. It’s more like we’re using the stories within our movie.”
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark opens August 9.
