Are You Afraid of the Dark Won’t Feature Stories From Series

In an interview with Slash Film, screenwriter Gary Dauberman revealed that the upcoming Are You Afraid of the Dark film won’t include any of the stories from the original series. Here are highlights:

On scenes from IT that he wanted to write for the second movie: “Like I said with the first one, it’s really this embarrassment of riches. It was trying to do your best job of taking what Stephen King wrote so beautifully all those years ago and try to translate it to the script page. For me it was just really fun to be able to revisit these characters and see what they’re up to 27 years later. There was a challenge trying to get all those character introductions and “here’s where we are so far” which is fun to tackle. How can we find an elegant solution to introduce this many characters again to the audience? In the first one, they’re all together in school so you see them in a bunch but 27 years later, I don’t think it’s a spoiler they’re sort of scattered all over the country. So we see pieces of who they’ve become which I think is really exciting. Then of course it was great to see them return to Derry. The Jade of the Orient is such a defining and iconic scene in the book. That was something I remember as a thing I was writing towards. It was like, “Okay, coming up is Jade of the Orient. That’s going to be super cool.” It was a nice signpost to write towards which I dug.”

On the Swamp Thing TV series: “This is one, when you talked earlier about the rating for The Nun, we always set out to make Swamp Thing as hard R as we could and go graphic with the violence, with the adult themes and make it as scary as possible. Because we’re doing it through the DC streaming service, they really pushed us, although they didn’t have to push hard, for us to go as extreme as we could. We really took our inspiration from the Alan Moore run in Swamp Thing, this landmark I think run. Fans of that series will know it gets pretty weird and extreme and scary. We really wanted to live up to that standard that Moore set up back in the ‘80s. Then of course it allows us, Swamp Thing himself looks incredible what Justin Raleigh and the guys over at Fractured are doing with the suit. So it’s going to look amazing and less of the “man in suit” that you’ve seen in the movie and the other TV show.”

On the adaptation of Are You Afraid of the Dark: “That show is so important to me. I didn’t want to age it down too much because for it’s time, it had some really disturbing episodes and some really dark episodes. Not every story the Midnight Society told ended with happily ever after or a person learning their lesson and it will never happen again. I really embraced that side of things and I think it’s been a long time. I think fear is healthy for kids. I don’t think we have to always sand down the edges of things and that’s something I really wanted to do with Are You Afraid of the Dark. I think it is scary and I think kids will be scared watching it at times, and also they’ll laugh at times. I think it’s got a great message. I think it’s got a great heart to it but it is still scary. I think that’s great. I think it’s going to open it up to a wider audience. It is a completely original story I came up with, but it still has the Midnight Society and it still has the campfire. It’s still a story being told.”