A Classic Kid's Horror Series Beat The Sixth Sense To Its Twist By 5 Years

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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...220000842.html

BJ Colangelo
Fri, October 31, 2025 at 3:00 PM PDT
5 min read

Horror fans have their fair share of traditions every Halloween, usually centered around annual rewatches of our favorite movies, trips to haunted attractions, consuming nonsensically themed snacks, and celebrating the screamin' season with fun costumes. What a person watches each autumn will vary from person to person (although John Carpenter's "Halloween" is mandatory. Sorry, that's the law), but one of my annual traditions is doing a full season rewatch of Nickelodeon's "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"

For the uninitiated, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" was a Canadian horror anthology series created by D.J. MacHale and Ned Kandel that aired on Nickelodeon in the 1990s, inspiring two revival series with the most recent airing from 2019-2022. In the original series, each episode was presented as a scary story told around the campfire as part of the nightly ritual of The Midnight Society, a "Breakfast Club"-like group of tweens and teens brought together beyond the barriers of social cliques by a shared love of horror storytelling.

"Are You Afraid of the Dark?" served as the gateway for a generation of young people's budding love of all things horror, and while not every story was a home run (Looking at you, "The Tale of the Manaha"), there are a handful of all-timer episodes that've clearly influenced the new generation of horror filmmakers working today. Zeebo the Clown from "The Tale of the Laughing in the Dark," the titular villain in "The Tale of the Ghastly Grinner," or the genuinely nightmare-inducing pool ghoul of "The Tale of the Dead Man's Float" are cited as some of the best — but one episode featured a premise that would feature the main twist of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense," and hit the airwaves five years before his movie arrived in theaters.