What scares
Andrew Goodridge?
He’s giving us a month to find out.
Follow along with Andrew as he plans to get into the spirit of his favorite holiday by watching a different horror movie every day in the month of October.
October 14
Submitted for the approval of EverythingNac.com …
“Are You Afraid of the Dark” (1991-1996)
Nickelodeon
A couple days ago, I mentioned that I’m not sure where the horror and suspense filmmakers of tomorrow will look to find their inspiration. I stand by that. Everything today is terrible.
But it wasn’t that long ago that I remember kids enjoying good, scary, family-oriented books, TV shows and movies. When I was about 10 years old, I lived and died by the “Goosebumps” series. All of my friends and I carried those books around with us wherever we went, and we were at the book stores the first of every month to get the newest entry in the series.
“Goosebumps” may have dominated the market on sci-fi, fantasy and horror books for kids, but on television, it was a different story (even though “Goosebumps” was adapted into a television series, which was a, unfortunately, nothing more than a pale imitation). Every Saturday night on Nickelodeon, kids put on their slap bracelets and Scrunchies and Girbauds and gathered around the TV to watch “Are You Afraid of the Dark?,” a “The Twilight Zone”-esque anthology series aimed at the 7-12 demographic.
Each week, the members of The Midnight Society gather around a campfire and tell spooky stories. Ghosts and aliens and magic are the most frequent topics, but wolfmen and clowns and sorcerers and anything scary was fair game. Things usually turn out well for the protagonists on “AYAotD,” but occasionally the show ends on a dark or disturbing note. One of my favorite episodes ends with a kid trapped inside a pinball machine. No spoilers.
The Canadian-produced “AYAotD” ran for seven years, and it’s distinctly of its era. The costumes and hair styles and dialogue (“Let me check to see if my molecules are, like, simpatico” and “Un-puking-believable!”) are kitschy and fun, especially if you’re a child of the 90s. It also helped give a start to child actors/future stars like Ryan Gosling, Neve Campbell, Will Friedle, Melisssa Joan Hart, Hayden Christensen, Tia and Tamara Mowry, Jay Baruchel, Tatyna Ali and Eddie Kaye Thomas.
Lindsay and I have been watching “AYAotD” for the last two or three months, and we’ve made our way through almost all of the series’ 91 episodes. We took a brief break from the show, but we picked back up in honor of Halloween. We recently watched another favorite episode of mine, “The Tale of the Twisted Claw,” which was a remake of W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw.” The episode had a good heart to it (as all of the episodes do), but I like that the series never got overly preachy or didactic. Maybe TV executives were more confident in kids’ intelligences 20 years ago. They trusted their audience to find the moral without jamming it down their throats.
And the shows were just better. I hate you, Dora the Explorer.
I declare this meeting of The Midnight Society closed.
Andrew Goodridge likes movies so much that he married one. He teaches Audio/Video production, Filmmaking, and Film & Television History in Fort Worth, Texas. He would one day like to have a Pug, or maybe a Bulldog.
Andrew Goodridge can be reached at goodridge@everythingnac.com
Wat.
Monkey’s don’t have paws. They have hands. This means that TV/fiction/literature was dumber whenever WW Jacobs was hanging out, got smarter in the ’90s, and THEN got dumber just in time for Saw III and House of Wax. What are some contemporary *scary* children’s’ shows? Side note: certain parallels to “Temple of Doom” warrant exploration.