Ah, Are You Afraid of the Dark? Airing originally on Canadian television and getting the licensed simulcast treatment on Nickelodeon, this was a kids' anthology horror show that was everywhere during its peak years. If you weren't watching this on Saturday nights, you might as well have been buying offshoot Skidz pants from K-Mart, because you were out of it man. Every Monday, there was a group of 4-5 kids in my grade who would gather by the big stack of board games in the back of the room to hash over each new episode. And when I say hash over, I mean hash over. Like, it rivaled anything Robin Williams did in Dead Poets Society. We'd read into these things just as much as we read into pro wrestling, and folks, for my collection of grade school bros...that's a lot.
The experience of watching an episode of this show on Saturday night really was something else. For starters, it had a framing device to die for. Taking a cue from The Twilight Zone, what we had here was a "story within a story," as a group of kids - all from different schools, oftentimes with different groups of friends - would gather in the woods every Friday night to tell scary stories to each other. As a kid, this was one of those ideas that seemed so inherently cool that it hurt not to have your own bunch of friends to do this with. And man, how awesome were these kids' parents? Meeting up in the middle of a goddamn forest...at midnight...unsupervised...try this shit today and you'd be turned in to child services. It's also for this reason that I think we could DESPERATELY go for an Are You Afraid of the Dark? redux. Put this concept on TV today, kids would still think it was cool. Especially if you gave the kids distinctive personalities like they did here.
While the stories on the show were the main draw, weirdly enough, me and my group of friends found ourselves talking about the kids a lot more. First and foremost was the badass name of the club - The Midnight Society. The rule was simple. Each member could bring in a new member, who would be pulled in to the meeting place (while blindfolded, holy fuck) and do their best to scare the crap out of everyone else. If they did, they were in. This was the setup for the first episode of the series, as resident nice guy David brings his friend Frank to a meeting. A bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Frank has an ace up his sleeve in the form of the Dr. Vink character, a mad scientist-y type guy who would show up in all of Frank's stories from that point forward.
One of the real treats of the series was in noticing how the character traits of the members of the various Society members carried over into their stories. The founder of the group was Gary, and it's likely this guy that people who watched the show during its initial run remember the most. Kind of a bookish nerdy guy, Gary has a big interest in magic and sorcery. As such, most of his stories revolve around magic and a phony-baloney magic shop owner named Sardo. I absolutely LOVED whenever Sardo showed up in these episodes, if for no other reason than his catchphrase was fun to say (that's Sar-DO - No Mister, accent on the DO). There was David and Kristen, the resident members with a romantic interest from the early seasons, the latter of which was a prissy princess who liked to tell dark versions of fairy tales. There was Betty Ann, a sweet girl-next-door type whose innocent exterior hid a dark side, and thus liked to play up the macabre and morbid as much as possible in her yarns. In the later seasons, we got Tucker, Gary's little brother and all-around bastard kid who told a lot of stories about families facing danger and coming together. And then there was Kiki, a spunky tomboy and moralist who liked stories that dealt with kids dealing with their own choices while dispensing some African-American flavor.
One story introduction followed by dust being tossed into a fire later, and we were ready to be enthralled.
Random bit from Lick Ness Monster's childhood: When I was in fourth grade, I wrote my own Are You Afraid of the Dark? story where I (yes, I - Jon Lickness) got a stab at getting into the Midnight Society. The story I whipped out was about one of those abandoned houses that seemingly every small town has where all of the kids are afraid to enter or approach. One of the early bits had a kid going into said house and being horrified that the walls started to bleed before darkness shot out of the shadows and enveloped him. Yeah, I was one fucked up kid. Of course, everyone in the Society loved "The Tale of the Bleeding Mansion." Especially Betty Ann, who was so impressed with my storytelling prowess and general coolness that she wanted to date me.
Ladies and gentlemen, my first ever attempt at self-serving fan fiction.
With that lovely bit of waxing out of the way, let's go through some of the notable tropes, characters and episodes of the series.
First and foremost have got to be the recurring characters Dr. Vink and Sardo. Vink showed up three times as a villain in an awesome trilogy of episodes where the doctor would bring his trademark inventions to hapless kids and summarily unleash them. The best of these is undoubtedly the season three finale "The Tale of the Dangerous Soup," where Vink has managed to find a way to extract the liquid form of fear from his hapless victims utilizing an ancient gargoyle statue, putting the fear into stew concoctions and selling them at his restaurant. The episode stars a young Neve Campbell as a restaurant employee, and it's got some truly nightmarish bits involving the various characters' fears being played out. Freaky-deaky Sardo was in four episodes, and this guy was a different beast - not an out-and-out villain, he was really much more of a clown, selling cursed artifacts or powerful magical tools to the hapless kids in his stories while being totally oblivious to the carnage. These two long-running characters eventually met up in the team-up story "The Tale of Cutter's Treasure," where Dr. Vink makes a babyface turn in an excellent two-parter starring Charles S. Dutton as an evil pirate hoping for one last showdown with a worthy adversary.
Unlike Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark? didn't shy away from moral lessons. This starts in the second episode, the immortal Betty Ann yarn "The Tale of the Laughing in the Dark." Kids in my age bracket remember Zeebo the Clown and the main character's dickish reaction to stealing Zeebo's nose. The third act, with the kid getting his just desserts, was pretty freaky stuff for a ten-year-old to process. Another good example was Kiki's Season 3 story "The Tale of Apartment 214," where a teenage girl has just moved into a new apartment building and becomes friends with an old woman who lives in an adjacent apartment. After breaking a promise, she finds out the old woman's true identity and learns a big-time lesson in the process. But relax people, there's a happy ending. And then there's "The Tale of the Crimson Clown," where Gary uses a story to teach his younger brother about being a good kid with something that I can safely say was the most horrific thing I'd seen on any medium at the time I first saw it. Folks...the bratty kid in this story gets such a long, drawn-out, creepy punishment that it really must be seen to be believed. And they showed this stuff to CHILDREN. No wonder we're all so messed up.
The episode list really does read like a timeline of my childhood from those years - there are a legit 20 episodes that I would give ***+ if I was grading them on my movie scale, and amazingly enough, they still hold up well through adult eyes.
"The Tale of the Super Specs" - Sardo's first story, where Gary proves to the Midnight Society that he hasn't lost his touch by giving us the first (da-dum) BAD ENDING in the series.
"The Tale of the Dark Music" - Maybe the single most scary episode of the series, where a friendly paper boy discovers that the door in his basement is a gateway to hell every time that music plays.
"The Tale of the Frozen Ghost" - Three words: Melissa Joan Hart. Two more words: I'M COLD. Brrrrrr.
"The Tale of the Watcher's Woods" - A young Jewel Staite guest stars in this episode about a trio of witches who have eternally held up in the woods near a summer camp, and an ancient entity that lords over the wilderness.
"The Tale of the Dollmaker" - Google this episode title and just look at the image that comes up. This story about a dollhouse that transforms people into living dolls is something else.
"The Tale of the Quiet Librarian" - Proving once again that silence is always creepier than LOUD NOISES, this is a story for every kid who has ever feared their old, crotchery library wench.
"The Tale of the Fire Ghost" - Many of the Are You Afraid of the Dark? ghost stories were particularly strong, and this one is no different. Don't look into the fire, people.
"The Tale of the Dead Man's Float" - This one came out near the end of the show's run, and what a way to go out. An undead zombie that drags unsuspecting kids to a watery grave? Count me in.
It goes on and on. Without a doubt, Are You Afraid of the Dark? qualifies as one of the finest quality kids' shows of all time. Its quality is such that I still peruse Youtube playlists or, on the nights when Frontier Internet feels like saying "No Mas" at 7:00 p.m., digging out my season DVDs. This was a show for children that actually respected its audience, a common occurence at the time it aired but something that is at an unbelievable premium these days. If they scared the crap out of the kids, the people behind this show didn't worry about it. They knew that being scared is cathartic, a release of tension that can't be matched by any other type of story. And if they could make you want to be the cool kids telling the stories in the process of give you a nice little moral lesson, that was just an added bonus. It's a show from a bygone era that is very sadly bygone, and one that is treasured for a reason.
I guess what I'm saying is that Joe Bob wants you to check it out, people.
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