Itsy bitsy spider … Klek Entos crushed his audition on America’s Got Talent, though he later crashed and burned. Well, he burns here, too.

A word of advice to today’s young magicians: Keep at it. Even if you don’t become a full-time professional prestidigitator with a permanent Vegas residency, you may find that the skills you hone in magic end up becoming very useful in other fields. Like, say, directing a widely-acclaimed horror movie.

Ghost Stories is an upcoming movie helmed by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, and its based on their stage play of the same name. Both Nyman and Dyson have a history in magic. In a red carpet interview, Nyman explains how his past work in magic ties into his more recent projects with horror.

For those of you magic fans who like being terrified for entertainment, Ghost Stories does appear have some light cross-over into the principles of magic. There’s even a bit in the trailer where the voice-over tells us, “The brain sees what it wants to see.” Misdirection made scary!

Andy Nyman is a man of many talents: magician, actor, co-writer for Derren Brown, and now, leading man in a film adaptation of his own stage play horror show. 

It’s called Ghost Stories, and was created by Nyman in conjunction with League of Gentlemen writer Jeremy Dyson for the stage back in 2010, opening to rave reviews and running for five years.  

Now, it’s a film produced by Lionsgate UK with Nyman as protagonist Phillip Goodman, and early reports from the 2017 London Film Festival seem just as glowing. Nyman appears alongside Martin Freeman (Sherlock) and Alex Lawther (The End of the F***ing World) in a story focused on a series of three different hauntings. 

You can check out the trailer for the movie above, and take a glimpse at the film synopsis here:

Phillip Goodman, professor of psychology, arch-skeptic, the one-man ‘belief buster’ – has his rationality tested to the hilt when he receives a letter apparently from beyond the grave. His mentor Charles Cameron, the ‘original’ TV parapsychologist went missing fifteen years before, presumed dead and yet now he writes to Goodman saying that the pair must meet. Cameron, it seems, is still very much alive. And he needs Goodman to find a rational explanation for three stories that have shaken Cameron to his core. As Goodman investigates, he meets three haunted people, each with a tale more frightening, uncanny and inexplicable than the last.  

It seems the kind of creepy puzzle box experience that only a magician could dream up, and I can’t wait to see it for myself. You can look for it soon in theaters, as it premieres in theaters worldwide on the appropriately skin-crawling date of Friday April 13, 2018.