The new horror-thriller Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark faithfully adapts several stories from the original, classic kids books by author Alvin Schwartz and illustrator Stephen Gammell, but one of the most famous monsters is noticeably different from his literary progenitor. And his story is a lot less gory in the film. [SPOILERS lie ahead!]
“Harold,” the murderous scarecrow, makes an appearance in the new film by André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe), but fans of his terrifying tale in the books will notice some major differences in the new film. In the movie, Harold violently fills his victims with straw, turning them into scarecrows. But in the original… he skinned them.
But just because he doesn’t skin anyone in the film doesn’t mean that they didn’t shoot that scene…
“Yeah, that scene does exist,” André Øvredal admitted, laughing during a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting.
“We shot something to that effect that we decided upon taking out.”
So why did the scene of Harold skinning a teenaged victim not make the final cut?
“A bit of several things,” Øvredal explained. “Normally when you take something out, it’s several reasons for it.”
“Yes, the fear of being overtly gory. We wanted to make sure that the film didn’t go too gory because it was just a taste thing and a tonal thing,” he continued. “But it was also the fact that we couldn’t quite fit the moment into the edit in a way I was expecting to.”
“I love that story. I love that moment. But we were trying to just kind of get to the right pace, [get] the heart of that story across. The anger, the kind of the conflict between the characters, because that story’s so specific. We wouldn’t be able to maneuver through that story in our tale, in a way. You know, in a logical way. It would be too difficult. So we had to adapt it a little bit,” the director added.
But that doesn’t mean there were any reshoots on the Harold scene. The scene where his victim fills with straw was always intended to be part of the movie, André Øvredal said, and was not a replacement for the deleted shot.
“We basically had the shot after the fact [the scene with the straw], of seeing up on the roof, his skin splayed out. So it was supposed to be a punchline on that story but in the end, we decided that it’s more important that the movie flows then that we focus on that particular moment. Because it was more a tempo thing, actually,” Øvredal added. “It didn’t work.
“But that wasn’t a reshoot. That was in the script the whole time, that he was turning into a scarecrow right in front of our eyes like that,” he confirmed.
The other big change to Harold in the Scary Stories is his appearance. Whereas Stephen Gammell’s original drawing was of a fully intact scarecrow, the movie added a gaping hole in Harold’s stomach which the audience can see right through.
That hole is there for a very important reason, André Øvredal revealed.
“Yeah, that’s one detail we added because we wanted to make sure that you really understand, when seeing this creature walking and attacking, that it isn’t a guy in a suit,” the director said.
“It is really, for real, just straw and wood. And how do we ensure that the audience grasps that? We had to devise a way to actually show that.”
“We initially, we had a belly and everything, the way you would expect, exactly from the drawing. But we found that we had done such justice to the character in the rest of the design that for the audience to actually appreciate the rawness of this creature, we had to make that one alteration,” Øvredal concluded.
You can read my review here and see Harold in all his eerie glory in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, in theaters now!
