People who enjoy fretting about things over which they have no control whatsoever have spent a lot of time fretting about the dissolution of America’s monoculture. Cultural critics fear that generations X and Y, due in no small part to the niche-friendly advent of the Internet, don’t experience culture as a unified entity, and consequently won’t have the shared touchstones of previous eras. This may be true in a grander sense, but the occasional record, film, or book can still cross over and provide a generation with a bit of common pop-cultural ground. Today, Deadline reports that one of those precious entertainments that Only ’90s Kids Can Remember! will soon make the jump to the big screen.

Anyone currently between the ages of 18 and 30 probably endured a sleepless night or 10 at the hands of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, a trilogy of terrifying short-story collections. The books’ illustrations alone may keep the present-day psychiatry industry afloat, depicting children harvesting toes, decomposing brides, and whatever this thing might be. The spooky tales ranged from the macabre (two words: face spiders) to the goofy, such as a story in which a threatening caller calling himself The Viper turns out to be a friendly window-washer with an Eastern European accent.

Now, Deadline reports that CBS has landed John August to adapt the scariest book since the Necronomicon for the silver screen. August’s credits include some beloved collaborations with Tim Burton (Big Fish, Corpse Bride) and some the occasional clunker (Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), but the key to predicting the tone of his Scary Stories treatment lies in another past project. August also wrote the script for 2012’s delightfully creepy Frankenweenie. That film fused a childlike spirit of fun with good, clean scares reminiscent of the Vincent Price/Roger Corman cycle of Gothic horror.

Adapting a book of short stories could make for tricky business on a structural level. The simplest approach would be for August to break the stories into self-contained anthological shorts, though it bears mentioning that this can feel disjointed without the aid of a sufficiently sinister MC. For an exemplar, Boris Karloff’s presided over the three grim yarns that made up Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath with a magnetically eerie flair. It’s also possible that like some fiendish mad scientist, August may stitch the stories together into a single, cohesive narrative.

Either way, when this film inevitably locks down a release date in the neighborhood of Halloween, it could be a nice trip down Childhood Trauma Alley, the horrifying sidestreet branching off from Memory Lane.