For young horror fans in the 1990s, there was only one show that invited them to sit around a campfire and share scary stories: Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a seminal Nickelodeon anthology about a secret teenaged cabal, “The Midnight Society,” who gathered every week to share their tales of terror.
Are You Afraid of the Dark?, like many other nostalgia properties, is returning decades after its cancelation. But unlike similar retro kids horror franchises like Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, it’s not going to theaters. It’s not even going to be a TV series. It’s a three-part TV mini-series, written by BenDavid Grabinski (Skiptrace) and directed by Dean Israelite (Power Rangers), with the first installment airing on Nickelodeon on Friday, October 11.
Bloody-Disgusting took BenDavid Grabinski aside at a press event in Los Angeles to talk about the reboot’s evolution from a movie, to a TV series, to the mini-series fans are about to see. And like everything else in Hollywood, it’s quite a journey.
“I’m a huge, huge, huge, super obsessed fan [of Are You Afraid of the Dark?],” Grabinski explains. “I grew up with it. It’s like one of things that’s a giant nostalgia button for me.”
“I was writing a movie for this producer, Matt Kaplan, in summer 2018. It was another horror movie. At the time they were doing an Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie and he needed a writer to come in and I wasn’t really on anyone’s radar, because I wasn’t… I’d been working consistently for a long time but I wasn’t like an A-list dude,” Grabinski adds.
“But I was like, ‘Guys, I really, really, really love this and I feel like I know exactly what this movie should be.’ I wrote a 20-page single-spaced document, writing down what I thought a movie should be of Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Everyone was seemingly blown away by it,” Grabinski says, before he decides to correct himself. “You know, it’s not for me to say but it was enough that I got the job.”
So it seemed pretty straightforward. Are You Afraid of the Dark? was destined for theaters! But only for a little while…
“I wrote a bunch of drafts of that, and then I was directing a movie and while I was doing that I got a call from Nickelodeon saying, ‘Hey, we really liked your script for the movie. Do you have any idea of what we should do if we wanted to make a new show?’ and I immediately said yes, a thousand times, and went in and pitched a show, basically saying what I thought it should be,” Grabinski reveals, enthusiastically.
Alas, it was not to be.
“I got hired and then they decided my initial pitch was probably not a right thing for a first introduction to it, so they wanted me to come up with a new concept,” Grabinski explains. “Because I wanted to come up with something that would work for ten-year-olds who’d never seen it and for someone like me who grew up with it.”
“And I texted the producer, Spencer Berman: ‘I want to do an evil carnival. I want Rafael Casal to play the bad guy, Mr. Top Hat, who’s like an evil Willy Wonka.’ That’s really all I had,” Grabinski confesses. “They really, really responded to that, and then I broke the story for it and then it was like a bullet train because they decided, ‘Oh, we want it to be out next October.’ So I wrote three episodes, we met a bunch of directors, hired Dean [Israelite] and here we are!”
But where, exactly, are we? BenDavid Grabinski explains that this new mini-series isn’t an alternate version of the originally-planned movie, or an extended version of the pilot for the series Grabinski was planning. It’s an all-new, standalone, reintroduction to The Midnight Society… and maybe more.
“The story that I wanted to do [in the reboot series that was originally planned] was not necessarily an introduction to the Midnight Society,” Grabinski says. “What I realized afterwards was like, that’s the wish-fulfillment thing that I always wanted to see when I saw the pilot, which is… the very first episode starts with a kid in the woods, he sits down on a tree stump and they pull a thing off his head and they say ‘Hey, you’re going to tell a scary story and if we like it we’re going to let you into the group.’
“So I’m like, who is this kid? What would it be like to be asked? What is the best story to go into this about a kid who would be invited to join the group, they tell a story to audition, and then where does that story go from there?” Grabinski explains. “And that led to the carnival thing and a lot of other stuff.
“There’s some stuff I want to say and some stuff I don’t want to spoil because it has ‘twists and turns,’” Grabinski says, making air quotes with his hands to denote his self-effacing sarcasm. “Make sure you note that I had quotation marks on that, that I was being sarcastic.” [Editor’s Note: Done and done!]
“But what I realized was that the other idea I had would be like, a really good third season theory. So I put that in my back pocket and I still have that,” Grabinski teases.
BenDavid Grabinski added that the Are You Afraid of the Dark? mini-series could “ideally” lead to a new regular series. He’s quick to remind us that it’s not his decision to make, but that if it was, he’d green light it in a heartbeat.
“I’m not in charge of the purse-strings or the decision-making. I’m just a writer/executive producer person. But I would make a thousand episodes of the show, and I have a million ideas,” Grabinski concludes. “But this to me was the best way to meet the group and bring out this concept of The Midnight Society to a new generation of kids.”