Bugs, Bonfires and Baby Ryan Gosling: A Horrifying (and Sometimes Hilarious) History ofAre You Afraid of the Dark?

Mar. 15, 2025

The cast of ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?'.Photo:Nickelodeon Network via Alamy

Nickelodeon Network via Alamy

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 likeThe Twilight Zone,Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the films of John Carpenter and the books of Stephen King — not to mention the Universal monster crew.

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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 whotold Vulture in 2012that 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’sEncyclopedia Brown. It was onEncyclopedia Brownthat 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.”

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’sSlimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age, it was explained that the name, sadly, had already been used elsewhere.

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 MacHalerecalled toComplexin 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 launchingThe Adventures of Pete & Pete. Mulvaney came across this treatment forAre You Afraid of the Dark?in the development slush pile and liked it enough to take a chance on it.

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 theGlobe 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!’ "

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.

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’s1984provided 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’sThe 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.

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.”

A still from ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?'.Paramount +

Paramount +

This unfortunate incident may partially explain why MacHale took a somewhat dim view of The Midnight Society in later years. “The fact is,” he continuedtoComplex, “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 downAre You Afraid of the Dark?in favor of joining the famous version ofThe Mickey Mouse Clubthat 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 inThe CraftandScream, 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 fromEntourage, 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 futureAmerican Piestar also hadhisfirst-ever screen role in the 1994 episode “The Tale of the Curious Camera.”

Rachel Blanchard

Jay Baruchel

Baruchel, whom some will remember as one of the cast of players in Judd Apatow’s roster, is the real MVP ofAYAOTD. 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 filmThe Art of the Stealin 2013.

8. Kids were rejected during auditions for looking “Too Disney.”

Actor Jason Alisharan says in the Nickelodeon oral historySlimed!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 inSlimed!, “I’d like to sayAre 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 toThe Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling on ‘The Twilight Zone’.CBS/Getty

CBS/Getty

10. The mystical campfire dust has a disappointingly ordinary list of ingredients.

The cast of ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?'.United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

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 theGlobe 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 onGame of Thrones, has described howAre 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 ofGoT, he had to work out a similar effect, based on what he learned fromAre You Afraid of the Dark?.

11. Nickelodeon forbade the producers ofAre You Afraid of the Dark?from showing children using matches.

Nickelodeon was fairly hands-off during the production ofAre 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 toldComplex.

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 ofAre 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 separatedAre 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 withComplex, MacHale explained how the scripts “rarely played [the horror] for laughs; there was some humor in there, but we didn’t go theGoosebumpsroute of over-the-top silly scares. We tried to make it feel real, to make the characters feel real.”

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, watchingDark?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 ofAre You Afraid of the Dark?— but it might have inspiredThe Sixth Sense.

15. MacHale “never felt the love from Nickelodeon,” who allowedAre You Afraid of the Dark?to remain unavailable for years.

MacHale developed another horror show for Nick followingAYAOTDcalledThe 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 toComplex, “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 theAYAOTD.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 sinceAre 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, theAre 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 ofAre You Afraid of the Dark?in 2019, which lasted three abbreviated seasons.

source: people.com