In the early 90s, Are you afraid of the Dark? it was perhaps the smartest way on television to scare children in ways they would never forget. The title was formulated both as a challenge and as a premise. It looked like he was letting viewers discover a secret – the Midnight Society, where the kids get together late at night to tell each other scary stories. Are you afraid of the Dark? it was a low-budget smart television that understood how to scare children, but also to thrill them, signaling the beginning of an explosion of terror aimed at children of the 90s that later took off with RL Stine’s Shiver and the Disney Channel’s annual Halloween releases, like Don’t look under the bed and Halloween Town.
Times have changed and the show has also changed: in 2019, Are you afraid of the Dark returned to Nickelodeon more than 20 years after the completion of his original season in 1996. (And 19 years after the end of a short 1999 reboot). The 2019 miniseries had three episodes and occupied a page of american horror story, telling a continuous narrative that ended until the end of the season. It was really cool, a dark carnival story (no, no what Dark Carnival, sorry) and missing children. It didn’t fully land, but it was great when setting a tone, halfway between Weird stuff and Icarly.
In the new six-episode season, Curse of the shadows, the series resumes with a new cast in a new city. Shadow Bay – yes, that’s what it’s called – looks like a direct homage to Stephen King’s fictional Maine town, Castle Rock, a gloomy seaside village with many secrets. The story begins with a mystery: Connor Stevens (Parker Queenan), a member of this season’s iteration of the Midnight Society, has disappeared, and Luke McCoy (Bryan Gheisar), the protagonist of this season, gathers the gang to find out what’s wrong. Among the problems: a cursed forest and a creature called Shadow Man, who looks like Wendigo from NBC’s cannibal.
From the first episode, everything comes together in a clear and intelligent way, like a horror mashup that pulls from dozens of sources and puts them in a teen friendly environment. There is even an extremely good jump scare. But it is also an interesting evolution of the central premise of Are you afraid of the Dark?, continuing a slow departure from the original that began with the 2019 miniseries, subtitled Carnival of Doom. Unlike the original series (although similar to the 1999 revival), these horror stories are real and the children are really being haunted.
Although there is still a Midnight Society, Curse of the shadows makes them more like a Scooby gang interested in supernatural happenings, although it is implied that they still exchange stories in normal times, when their friends are not missing. It also promotes an idea implied by cast changes in the original show and put more explicitly in Carnival of Doom: the Midnight Society is not just a tradition passed from generation to generation, it is one that can be carried out in any city, and possibly is in each City.
A good horror story for kids isn’t just about scares, it’s about magic. Part of being a child is finding the world around you a little boring and wanting more. It is being convinced that wonderful things are happening to other people all the time and wanting them to happen to you. Curse of the shadows leans towards this idea. The cast is at an age when they’re beginning to learn how dark and troubled the world is: Hanna Romero (Beatrice Kitsos) is a zealous climate activist, Gabby Lewis (Malia Baker) has her first lousy part-time job as a waitress in a restaurant at the docks, and everyone lives in a fishing town, so several of your parents have an income that depends on the climate. They are concerned about their missing friend, but they are also looking for something more for the world around them – it is not by chance that the search takes them to a real magic store.
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Photo: Michael Courtney / Nickelodeon
Terror is not only real in Curse of the shadows, it is implied that the series takes place in a world where all the other scary stories from the original series may have happened as well. There are winks and nods throughout the first episode – and probably more in the ones to come – that suggest that a monster from the classic series could appear at any time. Maybe they just nod their heads to the past, but putting each past story together in a new truth is an extremely Stephen King move, and perhaps the best thing about this view of the show.
King is famous for putting many of his stories in the same universe – the same fictional cities, like Castle Rock, appear repeatedly, and his Black Tower series of fantasy novels explicitly link much of their work to a metafictional ür-story. Most of the king universe is not as orchestrated as the Marvel cinematic universe. It is more of an accumulation job: small passages and strong bonds that accumulate over time. This means that fictional places can to feel as if they had a real story, because they have: a story told in other stories, spread over decades.
Are you afraid of the Dark? Curse of the shadows has that sense of history, and is amplified by the fact that this type of programming seems like a rarity. Programs for pre-teens who aren’t ready for the CW yet, but aren’t really on the Disney Channel shit, aren’t as prominent as before. The Midnight Society, in its search for Connor, is taking viewers with them, welcoming them in a decades-old tradition of stories being exchanged on TV, scaring children with stories of monsters like Ghastly Grinner, but also suggesting that there may be a little more to the world than it may seem. You can find it, if you are brave enough when the lights go out.
New episodes of Are you afraid of the Dark? Curse of the shadows opens on Nickelodeon on Fridays.