Are You Afraid of the Dark? Showrunner BenDavid Grabinski Reveals the Risks and Responsibilities of Reviving the Series

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, adult horror fans were given countless terrifying tales on the small screen, thanks to George Romero’s Tales from the Darkside and HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, while burgeoning horror fans had to settle for family-friendly adventures. That all changed in 1990 when Nickelodeon debuted Are You Afraid of the Dark?, an anthology series whose offerings were closer to a PG-13 rating when it came to depicting ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. The series was a major hit with fans who were given just enough of a taste of the morbid and the macabre to pursue the genre further, creating life-long fans of terrifying tales.

One of those young horror fans was BenDavid Grabinski, who had the difficult task of reviving the show as a miniseries for Nickelodeon. While bringing a show back to life that he has a deep emotional connection to comes with its inherent joys, it also comes with tremendous pressure, as the stakes to not let down fellow fans were immensely high and the abbreviated three-episode structure wouldn’t allow him to merely tell campfire tales as each episode of the original series did.

ComicBook.com recently caught up with Grabinski to discuss his connection to the original show, his approach to the remake, and what the future could hold for Are You Afraid of the Dark? And, of course, we discussed what it would be like if Werner Herzog joined The Midnight Society.

The Real Darkness

ComicBook.com: I think the biggest question we all have about you personally is are you afraid of the dark?

BenDavid Grabinski: It’s funny, the dark does not scare me at all anymore, which is a little bit of a bummer. In some ways, I miss having stuff like that scare me. I think as you get older, you get scared by complicated existential things that replace that. Although, every once in a while, you still might be afraid that someone has broken into your place and that feels like the same thing as the dark.

As we talk about this Nickelodeon show, it’s definitely worth addressing that, as opposed to literal darkness, nothing is as terrifying as the figurative darkness of our future and the bleakness of reality.

I think it’d be a really good idea to talk about a show for nine-year-olds by talking about a nihilistic existential future. I think that’s really a good way to handle this.

Maybe we should back things up a bit before getting all Werner Herzog on our readers.

I’m really bummed that we couldn’t get him in these episodes but I really hope that he’ll make more appearances in future Are You Afraid of the Dark? stuff.

Now that’s all I’m hoping for, is to get Herzog in The Midnight Society to hear him say, “Submitted for the approval of The Midnight Society, I call this story, ‘Life.’”

For a transcribed interview, this joke won’t work, but imagine that I did the Sardo catchphrase with a Herzog voice. He can also be Dr. Vink. He can be Vink and Sardo. I think that would be the best way to approach it.

I think he should actually play all the original characters from the original show because that’s what kids are looking for. [Star Wars:] The Mandalorian really made all the right decisions by putting Werner Herzog in their space kids’ show because it’s what’s going to make me watch it. I feel like I could just rip off [Mandalorian producer Jon Favreau’s] approach, which is to put Herzog in this show.

When kids are tuning in to Nickelodeon on a Friday night, what they’re looking for is more Herzog.

We did a focus group with nine- and 10-year-olds and they kept bringing up Zak Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness. I wasn’t really sure that kids were watching Incident at Loch Ness, but it’s funny, I think it’s a hip movie for kids to watch because they always want to watch things their parents say that they shouldn’t and Incident at Loch Ness is a thing that kids love. I’m surprised. They bring up 13 Reasons Why and then Incident at Loch Ness. Not many people brought up Zak Penn’s gambling movie that he directed that Herzog was in, which was a bummer because I kept thinking why aren’t kids watching The Grand? Brett Ratner’s in that one.

Weren’t there talks early on that Rafael Casal, he was in negotiations for the show, and you had to play hardball with him and say if he doesn’t take this role then Werner Herzog was going to be Mr. Tophat?

It’s funny, Herzog showed up for a costume fitting and he said, “I haven’t been this creatively reinvigorated since Julien Donkey-Boy.” He kept comparing my scripts to Julien Donkey-Boy.

Well, that’s all I have, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Let’s go to the real questions.

First Exposure

What were your first experiences with Are You Afraid of the Dark? What was it about the series that made you so passionate about it, all these years later?

There’s a few things about the show that made it very much fused into the origin story of my nerdiness, because I wasn’t allowed to watch any movies made for adults as a kid. That’s a vague concept because yes, I was allowed to watch Hitchcock movies or stuff that was on PBS or old black-and-white movies that were made for adults, but violent stuff or R-rated stuff or things that were not meant for 10-year-olds were completely forbidden. I didn’t have many friends, really. I had two or three friends, but they weren’t allowed to watch stuff either, so the only access I had to horror was stuff made for kids. We didn’t have cable. When I would go to my grandma’s house, I’d watch Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel. I’d mainly watch stuff that was made for kids, but as I got older … one time I went there and Are You Afraid of the Dark? was on.

The thing you remember, always, was the opening credits and that is so amazing. It’s like my introduction to a lifelong horror obsession was Are You Afraid of the Dark? and something, I don’t know if I’m technically allowed to mention, called “Goosebumps.” I don’t know if we’re actually rivals. You could act like it’s Coke vs. Pepsi. I loved all of it as a kid. If someone came along and said, “Hey do you want to do a Goosebumps show?” I probably would have jumped at that. I personally prefer Are You Afraid of the Dark?, so whatever happened really worked out for me.

If anyone has watched the first episode by now, they could probably guess the following bit, which is I have this memory of watching the show and wishing I got invited to join that group. The idea of having a group of kids who liked horror that much and all seemed to like each other. I’m filling in a lot of subtext and things in there but that desire to join the group, I think, was my emotional way into telling the story because that’s how I made it personal, was tapping into that feeling of loneliness and thinking, if you found other people who understood your weird interests that things would change.

When I was a kid, there was no one into comic books and no one into nerdy stuff. There was always one kid in the school who was really into comic books or one kid in the school who watched wrestling. There was one kid who had some nerdy thing. There was always one Star Trek nerd, at least of people who would admit it. It was a different time. Now all this stuff is more mainstream, but I think the appeal of the original show, to me, was there’s a group of kids who like this shit, even though they don’t talk about pop culture, but they must love horror if they’re going to go and spend a late night in the woods telling these stories and scaring each other. That’s my assumption.

 

Reimagining the Material

I think you effectively captured the core elements that made that original series special, blended them all together, and pulled out a compelling new take on the concept with your narrative about how The Midnight Society would come together, at least in that first episode. Of course, you might have botched everything after that first one.

Yeah, it’s funny, I’m like, “What if the first one was good and then what if the rest weren’t?” It was amazing that Nickelodeon responded to that because it’s a little bit of an intellectual concept, starting good and then completely ruining a thing.

I think each episode, personally, is better than the one before it by design. There’s an escalation of stakes in that they get bigger as it goes along, because I didn’t want to feel like, in our first episode we went to a 10 out of 10 of being scary and putting these kids in jeopardy, because then there’s really nowhere to go. There’s an intentional sense of escalation. It’s really tricky because if you’re doing something that’s not anthology, you have to have things structurally take a different approach, because everyone will say, “Why did you make a limited series?” and my job is to say something interesting about that, but I think it was purely … it feels like I met with them two weeks ago and they wanted to make something new with Are You Afraid of the Dark? and they want it to air in October.

We finished the first two episodes about ten minutes before they premiered at Beyond Fest. There wasn’t really time to even make three, let alone anything, so the idea is, “Okay we’re going to make a limited series of three episodes.” I personally think of it like the miniseries that Battlestar Galactica had before they had their actual seasons, but I also designed it to be completely standalone, with, I think, an emotionally and narratively satisfying ending. If you watch this and you’re like, “I want more of that,” great, but I also feel like it is a self-contained thing. That was a long-winded way to say, if you’re making three episodes, it doesn’t make sense to me to have three separate stories if you’re also going to try to create character arcs for The Midnight Society and do all these things. Half the show is an emotional connection to it and then half is a creative, intellectual challenge to create a three-episode story that also feels like it is Are You Afraid of the Dark?, but it’s new and different.

Continued Adventures?

It might be early, but has the response from audiences and the network been positive enough that it’s possible we could be getting more episodes? Either as a regular series or as another miniseries?

The only thing I can say is I have a million ideas about where it would go from here. I think there’s a world where you can make a show that has kids telling stories around a campfire and also following them in the real world and balance the two. That’s an ideal situation for me, because I think you can have your cake and eat it too. If you can have these isolated stories that are vastly different in terms of subject matter, whether you’re doing something about vampires or ghosts or time-travel or aliens or whatever, and then also have the plot of kids and what they’re dealing with.

I like the idea of there being real horror and fictional horror because there’s a real opportunity to have something that never feels stale, but with these three episodes, in a way, it would have been easier to just follow the original series exactly and have everybody be happy and have it start with kids around a campfire. They say a name of a story and then we have a story. What I was hoping with this new version is that my love of the original show would be clear.

I didn’t know if people would get that until they literally saw that. I’ve been a little worried for a couple of months that people would be mad at me and not understand how much I love the original show and how much it meant to me. I’m happy that people seem to get it. I haven’t had anyone get mad at me yet, which has been really wonderful, because I’m still mad about choices they made in the [Fast & Furious] movies, so I understand the other side of things where someone is going to get mad at me about choices I made with something that means a lot to them, but so far, so good.

Hashtag “JusticeForTheMidnightSociety.”

Look, I’m just saying if someone brutally murdered Graham in one episode and then there’s a later season where he was invited to join The Midnight Society, I think people would be upset about it, even if you reverse engineer something like Idris Elba doing a fake news smear on him, [people would ask,] “That guy still killed Graham, so why did you invite him to join the Midnight Society? You’re sitting around a fire next to the guy who killed Graham,” and you think people would be upset because they love Graham and I love Han [from the Fast & Furious franchise] so it’s a little disrespectful to the fan base, but at the same time, I think I have to embrace the idea that the Fast movies aren’t really for me anymore. I think they’re really for the people who started watching Fast 5 and Fast 6 because the fan base was drastically increased, so when you have someone, like me, who has been there since the beginning and was very invested in this group of characters, I probably have a different emotional connection than those people do.

The third episode hasn’t aired yet so it’s not too late to film a post-credits scene of Graham getting killed, The Midnight Society gets a phone call, and Werner Herzog is on the other end and reveals he murdered Graham.

I think that Werner joining the group is great, but then we’d have to spend so much money de-aging him to make him look like he’s 10 years old. Then, I think if you de-age Werner Herzog to look 10 years old, you’re losing the star power of having Werner Herzog on your show.

Right, you can’t put him on the poster.

How are they even going to know it’s him? It’s going to seem like we created this motion-capture guy who’s doing a Herzog impression. How are they going to know that this guy who’s appearing as a 10-year-old is actually Herzog on set wearing a suit covered in white dots?

Easter Eggs

We’ve talked before about incorporating horror movie Easter eggs into the series, could you talk more about your approach to fitting them into episodes and the reaction from the network about referencing R-rated filmmakers?

This is more of an insecurity of my own personal thing, but making a show where you’re on set with like 100 crew members, other producers, and Dean [Israelite], who directed the hell out of the show, when you’re doing references that is just you doing them and not really telling anybody, it’s a weird situation. I was standing on the high school set — our show is in a middle school, but, movie magic — and I had this weird moment and I turned, surrounded by crew members, and I said, “Does anyone know why I called it ‘Herbert West Middle School’?” and no one did. I was like, “Man, I hope someone likes these choices later because I seem like a maniac right now.” A giant machine is making something and I’m emailing the art department or legal saying, “Hey, can you clear a t-shirt with a The Gate poster on it?” or having Beyond Fest send us one of the “Cronenberg for President” shirts and having a bunch of lawyers in a room making sure we can clear things and get the rights to stuff and no one knows why I’m doing it.

It’s funny, the one reference that I failed, which ended up pulling in a bit of narcissism, is in those first shots in the first episode, there’s a bunch of moving boxes and they all say “Grabinski Moo-vers” and there’s a cow driving a truck. The way these things work is when you’re naming things, you send a name to clearance, and they make sure that you won’t get sued and we were in a rush so I sent over like 15 names and, at the end, I put a back-up name, because we didn’t have enough time if they all got rejected and I knew I wouldn’t sue, so I did “Grabinski Moo-vers” and I got an email the day they’re making the props. They’re like, “They’re all rejected except Grabinski Moo-vers.” No one has called me out on this, but if anyone has subtweeted me or personally watched it and thought I was a maniac for having the company have my last name … I tried [Wes] Craven. I tried Romero. I even got really niche and, for some reason, they just didn’t clear.

The creative process … we want to act like everything has some intention behind it, but making a TV show is like being on a train that you’re building, while you’re building the train tracks, and it’s headed towards a wall, so some stuff, you just need things, and I lean into being idiosyncratic if we don’t have the time to make a choice that is necessarily thematically very important. It’s like, “Oh, that would be amusing.” I don’t know if this is all getting really inside, but maybe someone will be partially amused. I was reading Herzog’s book and he’s like, “Whenever you have moving boxes, just put your last name on it.” I was like, “Okay.” All the companies in his shows and all across his movies have his name everywhere.

That’s why his documentary Into the Abyss takes place at “Herzog Federal Penitentiary.”

The funny thing, I have to say this because no one has asked me and there’s a reason they wouldn’t ask me, but I just would like to have a public penance for this one, which is that all the products in the show have the logo from the evil corporation from the short I made called “Cost of Living” with Brandon Routh and Bret Harrison and Meredith Elizabeth Winstead in like 2010 that I kind of made as a goof, and when we were naming products, I sent the art department the logo and I’m like, “This needs to be on everything.” I got an email saying people don’t usually tell us what the logos for the things are going to be so I said, “Sorry,” and I assumed they weren’t going to do it and I show up on set and it’s in a million shots of the show, from cereal boxes to apple juice. Things have the logo from the corporation from a short I made that was watched by 200,000 people and played at a few festivals in 2010.

*****

Tune in to the final episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? Friday night on Nickelodeon.