UPDATE: 12/06/2017
The upcoming Are You Afraid of the Dark feature film–a portmanteau movie of horror shorts–has gotten a release date. The Hollywood Reporter reports the movie has been given a release date of October 11, 2019. We’ll let you know any more information as it develops.
Original story follows…
After nearly two decades, it may be high time for the Midnight Society to reconvene in a brand new cinematic adaptation of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Nickelodeon’s classic kids horror series that kept us sleepless on Saturday nights in the ’90s. Gary Dauberman, the screenwriter of It and Annabelle: Creation, has been signed to write the Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie and serve as a producer as well.
Via The Hollywood Reporter, Dauberman indicated that his take on Are You Afraid of the Dark? would remain true to the spirit of the original series, which actually made its debut on Canada’s YTV in 1990 before it was picked up by Nickelodeon. Every episode of the show featured the Midnight Society, a group of teenagers who held secret meetings in the woods where they shared scary stories with each other, thus incurring each episode’s isolated haunted tale.
As fans will remember, the storytellers weren’t simply interchangeable characters, and they each had their own personalities as well as a tendency to explore familiar themes in their stories. It’s unclear if Dauberman intends to completely reboot the TV series, or if he intends to simply pick up where the Midnight Society left off. Because the tradition of the group was already passed from one generation to another, it would make sense if it was still going strong 20 years after the last episode.
Unlike the Goosebumps movie that was released two years ago, Are You Afraid of the Dark? seems to lend itself better to an anthology of tales within a single film, rather than a single story that mashes up elements from the most popular episodes. That said, the movie seems like a good opportunity to tell even scarier stories than the original show could, and to let the Midnight Society play a larger role than before. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine the Midnight Society getting a little too sucked into their own tales of horror, especially if the lines between fiction and reality start to blur.
What do you want to see in the Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie? Share your favorite episodes from the series in the comment section below!
Images: Nickelodeon/CTV
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