Watch: Spooky Teaser for ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ Horror Series
by Alex Billington
August 14, 2024
Source: YouTube
Take a look at this long lost footage from a reboot of the kid’s horror series Are You Afraid of the Dark? that never actually made it into production. Thanks to a tip from the director behind this reboot, a tiny bit of footage has appeared online. Director Jared Pelletier explains “this was shot years ago when the IP was being rebooted.” He was developing this for the studio before they greenlit a “lighter version”. The original Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a children’s horror anthology TV series from D.J. MacHale & Ned Kandel showing on Nickelodeon. It first aired on Nickelodeon from 1992 to 1996, with another different reboot that ran from 2019 to 2022. This teaser footage is for a darker version. Pelletier says, “this version took a darker 90s approach, when shows like Goosebumps were decidedly unafraid to scare kids.” Alas this is all we’ll see of it for now – the rest of the pilot likely won’t ever be released. It’s barely 40 secs but it’s cool to see anyway.
This Are You Afraid of the Dark? promo teaser comes from a never-actually-aired reboot of Are You Afraid of the Dark? by director Jared Pelletier (also of many other short films) – he now runs the studio Anthology Content. It was produced by Michael Chwastiak, and made by Anthology Content. The music is an original composition created for the pitch by Daniel Ciurlizza (listen to the full track here). With cinematography by DP Kristofer Bonnell. This 1990s-inspired iteration was developed between 2016 – 2018, before the more Stranger Things-adjacent 2019 reboot. Are You Afraid of the Dark? is a Canadian-American TV series that originally aired from 1991 to 1996. It premiered with the episode “The Tale of the Twisted Claw” as a pilot on October 31st, 1990, on the Canadian television network YTV, before eventually airing on Nickelodeon in the US. The series was restarted in 2019 with the latest eps in 2022. Will they ever let it be this dark again?