Tapping into the nostalgia of the ’90s is one of the biggest trends in pop culture currently, which is sure to continue with a feature film adaptation of the Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark? The young adult horror series, which will be penned by IT scribe Gary Dauberman, has been confirmed to be released on October 11, 2019.
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“The show is about the shared experience of telling stories — especially scary ones. We’re going to celebrate that with this movie and honor the darker, scarier tone of the show, which was really groundbreaking for Nickelodeon at the time. I hope the Midnight Society approves,” Dauberman recently revealed.
The screenwriter’s mention of “The Midnight Society” is a direct reference to the series itself, which focused on a group of friends who would come together every week at midnight to tell each other scary stories. The series covered a variety of different horror subgenres with its tales of terror, ranging from haunted clowns to other dimensions to people rising from the grave.
The series was inspired by other hit horror anthologies of the time, like Tales From the Darkside and Tales From the Crypt, but its blend of humor and horror also paid homage to the series that helped start it all, The Twilight Zone. One big distinction between this series from those others is that, with the series airing on Nickelodeon, the stories themselves were pretty tame by comparison.
The initial series ran for five seasons, with the Midnight Society featuring a somewhat stable roster of storytellers. Characters came and went, but there was rarely much of a narrative connection for the storytellers, with the focus always being the stories they told. A revival of the series kicked off in 1999, only lasting two seasons.
Horror was hot for kids in the ’90s, with R.L. Stine releasing the Goosebumps series of books around the same time, which also featured a variety of scary stories that were targeted towards a younger demographic. The popularity of the books resulted in the creation of a TV series of the same name, which ran for four seasons.
At this point, it’s unclear if the Are You Afraid of the Dark? film will be in an anthology format, with different members of the Midnight Society reciting various tales, or if the film will follow a path similar to the Goosebumps adaptation, bringing a variety of iconic stories to life to confront the group of storytellers.
Stay tuned for updates about Are You Afraid of the Dark?
[H/T The Hollywood Reporter]
