Rather than individually adapting the tales from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, this year’s Andre Ovredal-directed film is taking an approach similar to the Goosebumps movie by unleashing several of the most iconic monsters and stories from the books all at once. In other words, it’s *not* an anthology, and producer Guillermo del Toro explained the simple – and smart – reason why during the film’s San Diego Comic-Con panel.

“When we started talking about this about five years ago, I had to think about it,” del Toro told the SDCC crowd over the weekend. “Anthology films are always as bad as the worst story in them — they’re never as good as the best story.”

In other words, del Toro didn’t want to set the film up for failure by taking the expected anthology approach; and oddly enough, it was Pan’s Labyrinth that helped him crack the plot.

Del Toro explained, “Then I remembered in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ I created a book called the Book of Crossroads. I thought it could be great if we had a book that reads you, and it writes what you’re most afraid of. Then the theme became stories we tell each other.”

In Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, “It’s 1968 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 stories come to life on August 9th, 2019.