Yahoo Lifestyle Bugs, Bonfires and Baby Ryan Gosling: A Horrifying (and Sometimes Hilarious) History of “Are You Afraid of the Dark”?
From its cast of pre-fame child actors to the psychology of the scares and what was in the campfire dust, learn more about the groundbreaking Nickelodeon series
Nickelodeon Network via Alamy
The cast of 'Are You Afraid of the Dark?'“Submitted for the approval of The Midnight Society …” Those words evoke terror and delight for many ‘80s babies to this day. That’s because you were certain that whatever tale would follow — delivered around a campfire by suspiciously unsupervised kids in a remote patch of woods — would raise the hairs on the back of your neck and possibly cause you to sleep with the light on for the foreseeable future.
Yes, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, the gem of Nickelodeon’s SNICK programming block, is a show that taught a generation to fear. Yet it also proved a crucial stepping stone for appreciating more grown-up works like The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the films of John Carpenter and the books of Stephen King — not to mention the Universal monster crew.
But Are You Afraid of the Dark? boasted substance in addition to style. The show's approach was groundbreaking for treating young audiences with respect and challenging them with narratives that were dark, imaginative and sometimes unsettling. Unlike typical children's programming, it addressed complex themes like friendship, fear, loss and bravery, empowering its viewers by recognizing that they could handle such mature themes. It remains a beloved cultural touchstone — proving that fear, when approached thoughtfully, can be thrilling.
Read on to learn more about this groundbreaking Nickelodeon series. And for more behind-the-scenes stories and little-known details about Are You Afraid of the Dark?, check out the recent episode of the iHeartRadio podcast Too Much Information, hosted by former PEOPLE editors Jordan Runtagh and Alex Heigl.
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1. Are You Afraid of the Dark? was initially conceived as “bedtime stories for lazy parents.”
The show's creator, D.J. MacHale, was an NYU film grad who told Vulture in 2012 that he “was getting nowhere writing screenplays,” but had a day job that involved traveling internationally making corporate and educational videos. On the advice of a friend, he pivoted to writing children's media, going from ABC afterschool specials to episodes of HBO's Encyclopedia Brown. It was on Encyclopedia Brown that he met his future production partner Ned Kandel, and together they developed a pitch he described to Vulture as “bedtime stories for lazy parents.”
Their initial idea was to take “some old-time actor who was out of work but whom everyone knew, and put him in an easy chair with a roaring fire and a big book and he’d tell fairy tales. We’d record them and put a home video package together for parents who wouldn’t necessarily want to sit down and do this themselves for their kids.”
While brainstorming exactly what these tales could be, MacHale realized that the stories he liked best as a kid were the scary ones, and so they decided to do away with the "creepy" concept of having an old man talk to kids and just have the kids themselves do the work by telling the stories around a campfire.
2. The working title of the show was a groan-worthy pun.
The working title for MacHale and Kandel's project was “Scary Tales” (a pun on "fairy tales"), but in Mathew Klickstein's Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age, it was explained that the name, sadly, had already been used elsewhere.
They arrived at the show’s ultimate title by revisiting a classic children’s book. “There was a scary story written by Dr. Seuss … called What Was I Scared Of?, and I always loved that story,” MacHale continued to Vulture. “So, I took that title and thought, ‘Well, I was afraid of clowns and I was afraid of the dark …’ And that’s where the title [of our show] came from: Kind of an answer to that Dr. Seuss title.”
3. Nickelodeon originally passed on the show.
MacHale and Kandel brought their proposal to Nickelodeon, then still a fledgling cable network. The executives were a little skittish at the prospect of a show that specifically aimed to terrify children and opted to pass. As MacHale recalled to Complex in 2014, "We pretty much pitched exactly what we ended up making, and they were just like, 'No, you can’t do this. You can’t scare kids. It’s not going to fly.' "
MacHale and Kandel left behind a three-page treatment of the show, and in the year between the original rejection and MacHale and Kandel's return to Nickelodeon to pitch a different show (which they also did not sell), the network hired an executive named Jay Mulvaney – who also had a hand in launching The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Mulvaney came across this treatment for Are You Afraid of the Dark? in the development slush pile and liked it enough to take a chance on it.
4. Location shoots were haunted by bugs and the literal dead.
The production was based in Canada, where MacHale tirelessly location-scouted eerie places to shoot outside their home base of Montreal. While the show was granted permission to film in cemeteries, they hit a snag due to a Canadian law against showing the real names of the dearly departed on TV. To avoid legal repercussions, the crew constructed a series of fake foam tombstones to strategically block real ones, complete with fictitious names that jokingly nodded to the cast and crew. Story editor Paul Doyle burst out laughing when he saw one that read, "Here Lies Blind Paul." while editing. "To this day D.J. denies that he was commenting on my editing,” he told the Globe and Mail.
Meanwhile, for scenes set in the "deep dark woods," MacHale secured permission from an arboretum to shoot there, but the protected status of the animals and plant life caused some logistical headaches. "You couldn't use any insecticides to kill the mosquitoes, which swarmed that place like a freaking horror movie,” he added to the Globe and Mail. “The crew would have these beekeeper outfits and gloves because it was just so vicious. I remember [actress] Mia Kirshner doing a soliloquy, playing this possessed girl, and this mosquito landed on her nose and she tried so hard to stay in character, and then, 'I can't take this any more!' "
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5. To cope with the intense workload, many of the stories were based on classic literature.
The campfire scenes were filmed on a soundstage in Quebec. Because production didn't want to repeatedly build and tear down the set, all the wraparounds for an entire season had to be filmed in advance over the course of a couple of weeks. This meant that all episodes for a given season had to be scripted far in advance. This was a massive stressor for MacHale, who wrote (or, at very least, rewrote) every single script for the first seven seasons — a total of 91 episodes.
The brutal workload was lessened slightly by an edict from Nickelodeon. Still wary of selling horror and suspense stories to children, the network insisted that Are You Afraid of the Dark? had to draw some of its inspiration from the world of literature in an effort to guard against parental complaints. That way, MacHale told Complex, "If somebody complained, they could say, 'What are you talking about? That’s classic fiction! This is Daphne Du Maurier. This is Edgar Allan Poe.' "
For example, the season 1 episode “The Tale of the Twisted Claw” is a riff on W. W. Jacobs' short story, “The Monkey's Paw.” George Orwell’s 1984 provided the seeds for equally dystopian “Tale of the Phone Police,” and season 2's "The Tale of the Dream Machine" shares common ground with Stephen King’s short story "Word Processor of the Gods." The writing staff, did, however, raid the world of creepy cinema for ideas. "The Tale of the Water Demons" borrows from legendary horror director John Carpenter's The Fog, while the silent film vampire Nosferatu literally comes out of the movie screen in “The Tale of the Midnight Madness.“
6. Are You Afraid of the Dark? co-creator D.J. MacHale sacrificed his health for The Midnight Society.
Loyal viewers of Are You Afraid of the Dark? will recall that these tales are told by The Midnight Society, a group of kids who gather in woods late at night to swap scary stories around a campfire. Though only seen for a few minutes at the beginning and end of each episode, the kids play a crucial role as the common link throughout the series.
"Anthology shows are really tough to do and they’re really tough to get popular because people watch their favorite TV shows to see what’s going to happen to their favorite characters," MacHale continued to Complex. "What’s the continuing story? What’s going to happen to Bill this week? Well, anthology shows don’t have that. It’s a different cast every week. So I said, 'OK, we need a lynchpin that’ll tie this thing together every episode.' ... They’re the closest thing to continuing characters we’d have on the show."
MacHale worked overtime to assemble what he deemed the perfect group for The Midnight Society. Despite living in Los Angeles, he embarked on what he called "the Magical Mystery Tour," hitting Vancouver, Toronto, New York and Montreal for casting sessions in all of those cities. This grueling circuit had its drawbacks: “When I hit Montreal, I started feeling sick; I had a fever. I came out of the shower in the hotel the next day, I saw a red dot on my chest and thought, ‘Oh no.’ So I called the production doctor and I said, ‘I think I have Chickenpox. I never had Chickenpox.' We traced it back — I would see thousands of kids — to some audition in Vancouver. That’s how I got Chickenpox. I was quarantined for 10 days in Montreal while prepping for the show.”
Paramount +
A still from 'Are You Afraid of the Dark?'That was not the only time MacHale’s health took a hit for the benefit of The Midnight Society. Because the campfire intro segments were filmed all at once, the kids only got together for a week or two each season. As a result, the cast didn’t bond in the way that many do. MacHale tried to assist by arranging a team-building trip, but the gesture ultimately backfired on him terribly. "I took them all bowling one night,” he recalled to Vox. “And I hurt my back that night bowling — to this day it still bothers me. I took The Midnight Society bowling, and now I have a bad back!”
This unfortunate incident may partially explain why MacHale took a somewhat dim view of The Midnight Society in later years. “The fact is," he continued to Complex, "the whole time I was making that show, I cared so little about The Midnight Society. It was an annoyance ... To me, The Midnight Society was never the interesting part about the show — the interesting part was the little movies that we made … It used to crack me up when people would say, 'I like this Midnight Society better than that Midnight Society,' or, 'I like this kid in The Midnight Society better than that kid.' I was always like, 'Who cares? That’s not what the show is about!' "
7. The show provided early acting gigs to Ryan Gosling, Neve Campbell, Hayden Christensen and more.
These grueling casting auditions yielded a bumper crop of talent, many of whom would become huge stars, including …
Ryan Gosling
MacHale wanted to cast the budding heartthrob, but he turned down Are You Afraid of the Dark? in favor of joining the famous version of The Mickey Mouse Club that included Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. That took two years in Florida, but MacHale snagged him for an episode when he came back to his native Canada after it wrapped — ”The Tale of Station 109.1,” which also featured Gilbert Gottfried.
Neve Campbell
Two years before her star-making turns in The Craft and Scream, Campbell appeared in the 1994 episode "The Tale of the Dangerous Soup" as the hostess and part-time bookkeeper at the Wild Boar, a restaurant renowned for its green-hued "dangerous soup," priced at $100 a bowl … where the secret ingredient is fear.
Hayden Christensen
Pre-Anakin Skywalker, Christensen played Kirk in the 1999 episode “The Tale of Bigfoot Ridge.”
Elisha Cuthbert
When MacHale auditioned Cuthbert to be in the second incarnation of The Midnight Society, he failed to remember she'd been featured in the show already. She appeared in "The Tale of the Night Shift," which also starred Sloan from Entourage, Emmanuelle Chriqui. MacHale asked Cuthbert who had directed her, at which point she replied, “You did.” It was Cuthbert's first-ever role on-camera.
Eddie Kaye Thomas
The future American Pie star also had his first-ever screen role in the 1994 episode “The Tale of the Curious Camera.”
Rachel Blanchard
The actress, who was at the time five years older than the rest of The Midnight Society, appeared for three seasons. Her character’s trademark? Always in a bad mood. She went on to star in the Clueless TV series and 7th Heaven, and also played smaller roles in Flight of the Conchords and the U.K. comedy series Peep Show.
Jay Baruchel
Baruchel, whom some will remember as one of the cast of players in Judd Apatow's roster, is the real MVP of AYAOTD. He featured in four episodes, which MacHale says is more than any other kid. Interestingly, he met one of his former costars from "The Tale of the Time Trap" — who'd since become a journalist — on a press tour for the Canadian comedy film The Art of the Steal in 2013.
8. Kids were rejected during auditions for looking “Too Disney.”
Are You Afraid of the Dark? was an important cornerstone in Nickelodeon's efforts to diversify children's television. "There were two mandates with casting, besides ‘good,’ " MacHale told Vox in 2015. "Diversity was a big one." Hilariously, MacHale added that "often a kid got nixed by Nickelodeon because they were too Disney: apple pie, freckles, cute, over-the-top acting. They were like, ‘That is a Disney kid, get rid of him.’ I think it’s one of the things that made Nickelodeon so great — if it smacked of 'Disneyana,' they wouldn’t do it."
Actor Jason Alisharan says in the Nickelodeon oral history Slimed! that "D.J. MacHale was way ahead of his time in making sure his show represented all kids. There was absolutely no problem with there being interracial relationships on the show, and, again, this wasn't commonplace for 1992. They didn't think it was even worthwhile to comment on it; instead, they just played it like it was normal, which is the greatest testament to representing diversity on a show." Their efforts resulted in an NAACP award nomination in 1996.
Gender-wise, writer-director Ron Oliver added in Slimed!, "I'd like to say Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a boys' show, but I have a feeling it was split down the middle, because we would switch off every episode with there being a girl protagonist or a boy protagonist. They were quite conscious of that at Nickelodeon. We were one of the first shows that actually tried to straddle the middle line and succeeded at it."
9. The show’s catchphrase was a nod to The Twilight Zone.
CBS/Getty
Rod Serling on 'The Twilight Zone'The Twilight Zone was an important tonal reference for MacHale, who believed his series fell more into the “suspense” category rather than “horror.” He would describe Are You Afraid of the Dark? as a mix of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the anthology TV series by the legendary director. Hitchcock may have been the so-called “Master of Suspense,” but The Twilight Zone was the show that got a special nod each episode thanks Are You Afraid of the Dark?'s catchphrase: “Submitted for the approval of The Midnight Society.” The line was a tribute to Twilight Zone host and creator Rod Serling, who was famous for introducing his show’s segments with the phrase “Submitted for your approval.” (Although, despite the line's infamy, he apparently only did so in three episodes during the show's initial five-year run.)
10. The mystical campfire dust has a disappointingly ordinary list of ingredients.
United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
The cast of 'Are You Afraid of the Dark?'For decades, millennials (and millennials at heart) have wondered about the mysterious dust that The Midnight Society storyteller would toss into the campfire, signaling the start of their tale with a dramatic burst of flames. In truth, the substance is significantly less mystical than you might imagine, consisting of glitter and powdered non-dairy creamer. “That stuff’s petroleum-based and it actually burns,” MacHale told Vulture. “Then we added some pyrotechnics in the fire itself, but Cremora does burn and gives off a little smoke.” (MacHale would help direct the campfire scenes by keeping his voice low and spooky, like he was a member of The Midnight Society, just to ensure that everyone remained in the mood.)
The homemade nature of the dust disappointed at least one new cast member when they first arrived on the set. "I came on third season and I was so excited for the magic dust used in the fire,” actor Daniel DeSanto told the Globe and Mail. “But it's just a bag of CoffeeMate and glitter."
The special effects team was forced to be resourceful out of necessity. SFX chief Steve Kullback, who later went on to win numerous Emmys for his work on Game of Thrones, has described how Are You Afraid of the Dark? was an important training ground for him because, as he told Vox, they could “never afford to fake things.” Without a budget or technology for CGI, they had to get creative. For example, the “twisted claw” in one episode was just a petrified turkey claw.
For the episode "The Tale of the Headless Horseman," Kullback described how he had to engineer a way to show a boy getting chased across a bridge, and then the horse (and its rider) bursting into flames. Ironically, for the last season of GoT, he had to work out a similar effect, based on what he learned from Are You Afraid of the Dark?.
11. Nickelodeon forbade the producers of Are You Afraid of the Dark? from showing children using matches.
Nickelodeon was fairly hands-off during the production of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, but there was one thing that the network mandated: They did not want to show kids using matches. (Which helps explain the flame dust in the campfire scenes.) "They didn’t want to teach kids how to do that and risk some kids accidentally burning down their homes," MacHale told Complex.
It may have also been a genuine fire hazard for the crew. Art directors used real foliage to dress the interiors, and by the end of the marathon Midnight Society shoots, the set was so dry that one season they were nearly shut down because the whole set presented a fire risk.
In 91 episodes of the show, all of which featured a campfire, only once do you see a child light a match — and that was only because it slipped through the censors. "In an episode I directed, Mia Kirshner was the star in that episode, and in that scene, she had to light a lantern, and she didn’t know how to light a match,” recalled MacHale. “We practically had to fake it because she was like, ‘I’ve never done this before!’ Which I guess maybe gives credibility to Nickelodeon’s theory that we didn’t want to teach kids how to light a match.”
12. One episode of the show was banned in the U.K. — to the disappointment of its writer, who intended for it to be an LGBTQ allegory.
Writer-director Ron Oliver remembers a specific episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? that Nickelodeon had notes on: The werewolf yarn “The Tale of the Full Moon,” which he said was received as being a bit too “John Waters meets David Lynch.” The episode was also met with resistance in the United Kingdom, where it was banned due to fears that a scene depicting two boys breaking into the werewolf's house would inspire copycat crimes among young viewers.
This was disappointing to Oliver, who wrote the episode with a very specific emotional subtext. It was his first script for the show, and, as a gay man, he said it's "definitely about a family dealing with how to tell their kid that his uncle is gay. In our case, I just made him a werewolf, but all the rest of it’s the same — as the father says, ‘There are lots of different kinds of families, Jed. This is ours.’ ”
13. MacHale made sure the stories focused on the children and not the supernatural.
Despite being tepid on The Midnight Society, MacHale knew that a children’s point of view was crucial to the success of the series. “This is the thing that separated Are You Afraid of the Dark? from other shows,” he explained to Vulture. “A writer would come in and say that they had this idea for, say, a haunted car. And I would say, ‘That’s cool, but who are the kids?’ I want a story about a couple of kids that have something going on in their lives that is real and has a real kind of conflict that we would be interested in watching even if we didn’t find the haunted car."
MacHale mandated that the writers avoid the metaphorical fireworks — monsters and supernatural forces — in favor of something more insidious: authentic emotion. In an interview with Complex, MacHale explained how the scripts “rarely played [the horror] for laughs; there was some humor in there, but we didn’t go the Goosebumps route of over-the-top silly scares. We tried to make it feel real, to make the characters feel real.”
This authenticity resonated with viewers and critics. In her Mashable piece “How We Faced Much More Than the Dark in Are You Afraid of the Dark?,” writer Jess Joho speculated why these stories struck such a chord with young people, especially as they entered puberty — a time when, in some cases, they felt alienated from their own bodies. “Kids were both the tellers and subjects of the tales, uniquely grounding Are You Afraid of the Dark? in teen perspectives at an important time in their maturation," she wrote. "That's why it's had such a lasting impact on our generation. From oral traditions to cognitive behavioral therapy, communal narratives serve a powerful function in society. And AYAOTD gave that power of storytelling to kids, helping them confront the real horrors of teen life with its plots, villains, and moral resolutions ... Many of the tales in Are You Afraid of the Dark? can be seen as mixed metaphors for the sense of displacement wrought by puberty, making things you used to like now seem childish and repulsive ...”
It’s perhaps no accident that MacHale’s own child couldn’t watch the show because she found it just too terrifying. He later told Vulture, “My daughter has a very vivid imagination, so even at 8 years old, watching Dark? is just too scary for her. I keep trying to get her to watch, but she wants nothing to do with it.”
14. We didn’t get a big-screen version of Are You Afraid of the Dark? — but it might have inspired The Sixth Sense.
Though the show has yet to make the transition to the big screen, there very nearly was an AYAOTD feature film back in its late ‘90s heyday. "I did write a Dark? movie called The Tale of the Wicked Gift for Paramount," MacHale said in Slimed. "It was an original story about the Boogie Man who was conjured centuries before by an ancient tribe as a means to discipline children ... The project never went anywhere because the folks who ran Paramount at the time didn't get that you could make a movie like that, meaning 'horror lite.' They felt that horror had to be either true horror or Scooby-Doo funny."
It looked like the execs had changed their tune by November 2011, when it was announced that a film adaptation of the series was in the works at Paramount Players from It writer Gary Dauberman and To All The Boys I've Loved Before producer Matt Kaplan, with filmmaker D.J. Caruso (who helmed Disturbia and XXX: Return of Xander Cage on the big screen and episodes of The Shield, Smallville, and Dark Angel on TV) tapped to direct. The film originally had an October 2019 release date, but eight months prior, Paramount quietly removed the film from their schedule.
But Are You Afraid of the Dark? made its mark on supernatural cinema of the late ‘90s anyway — maybe. Fans of the show have pointed out that the 1995 episode “The Tale of the Dream Girl” shares a similar storyline to The Sixth Sense, by writer-director M. Night Shyamalan. The episode in question centers on a boy who is ignored by everyone around him except for a girl who turns out to be a ghost. When an interviewer asked Shyamalan about whether he was inspired by the episode, he claimed that not only had he never seen the episode, but he was unfamiliar with the show as a whole. “That’s really weird,” he said in a 2017 interview with ScreenCrush. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that show. I don’t want to ignore something that might have been an influence, but nothing rings a bell when you say that.” (For what it’s worth, the cult classic horror movie Carnival of Souls was released in 1962 and is widely considered to be the originator of the whole “they were dead the whole time” twist ending.)
15. MacHale “never felt the love from Nickelodeon,” who allowed Are You Afraid of the Dark? to remain unavailable for years.
The first five seasons of Are You Afraid of the Dark? aired from 1992 to 1996 before the show returned for a two-season revival in 1999. Unfortunately, as MacHale explained to Complex, by the time the second incarnation aired, Nickelodeon "was already moving away from doing dramas," a decision he claimed primarily came down to budget. "Comedies are much cheaper to do, and kids love comedies, so they went with the lowest-common-denominator. They figured they had a better chance of getting a hit with a comedy than a drama.”
MacHale developed another horror show for Nick following AYAOTD called The Strange Legacy of Cameron Cruz. Chronicling the adventures of a psychic kid who would solve ghost stories and other supernatural cases, the production team ultimately filmed a pilot episode in 2001 with teen star Jesse McCartney — but that was as far as it got. "It took two years for this show to develop," MacHale added to Complex, "until they finally said to me, ‘You know, D.J., we’re not doing dramas anymore. We just don’t want to do them.’ "
MacHale never really felt as though the network ever went all in for the AYAOTD. This probably stemmed from the fact that they originally passed on his first pitch. This sense continued even after the show became a big hit. "I’ve always felt that since Are You Afraid of the Dark? ended … I never felt the love from Nickelodeon,” he said. “Maybe it’s the whole comedy thing since they’re getting away from dramas, but I never felt like [they thought], ‘Wow, we really have this gem that we have the complete rights to, we can show it until the magnetic particles fall off.’ ” (Partially due to contractual issues, the Are You Afraid of the Dark? DVD release has been inconsistent over the last 20 years, though the show can now be streamed in Amazon Prime.)
Nickelodeon did, however, announce a reboot of Are You Afraid of the Dark? in 2019, which lasted three abbreviated seasons.
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