Goosebumps vs. Are You Afraid of the Dark

I'm graduating college in a month so lately I've been taking some crazy nostalgia trips on YouTube. After going through the theme songs for most of my favorite 90s cartoons I stumbled on the openings for two of my favorite live-action series: Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark.

My brother and I used to sometimes argue about which series was better. I preferred Are You Afraid of the Dark because I thought it was scarier and Franklin preferred Goosebumps because it was "weirder and the theme song is cooler". And, okay, he's right, the Goosebumps theme is cooler. Just compare the two:

Goosebumps -

Are You Afraid of the Dark -

 

Funny thing is, these intros are pretty representative of the shows themselves. Although both fell into the kiddie-horror genre, they were fairly different in set-up and tone.

Are You Afraid of the Dark consisted of a frame narrative. Each episode began with the Midnight Society, a group of teenagers who met in the woods in the middle of the night and told each other horror stories around a campfire, and ended with them leaving with someone putting the campfire out with a red bucket of water. In introducing each new story the storyteller would give a brief explanation of what inspired their tale, take a handful of white dust from a leather pouch, throw it into the fire and say "Submitted for the approval of The Midnight Society, I call this story The Tale of..."

Meanwhile, each Goosebumps story stood completely on its own. Unlike Are You Afraid of the Dark, Goosebumps episodes were adaptations of R. L. Stines' Goosebumps book series and the narrators (if there were any) were contained within the story. Like Are You Afraid of the Dark, each episode (and each book) was a stand-alone story, with the exception of one or two sequels featuring a returning villain/monster.

The stories in each series were equally similar and different. Ultimately, what separates the two shows is tone. Both had a sort of kiddie Twilight Zone-esque quality to them, featuring twist endings and exhibiting the dark and creepy underbelly of suburbia. However, my brother and I agreed that the stories in Are You Afraid of the Dark were scarier than those in Goosebumps. Although to be fair that dummy was pretty damn creepy. And so was that mask. For the most part, though, they didn't make me feel nearly as unsettled as whatever was featured in Are You Afraid of the Dark. There was a humor in Goosebumps that was missing in the other show and every episode had a happy ending, even if some of them were more than a little weird.

One of my favorites was the one about a boy and his friends who were actually dogs made human; the episode ended with his pet cat becoming his new baby sister while he and his friends had reverted to their canine forms. Another was one where a pair of siblings who were convinced their neighbor was a monster. Not only did the episode end with the kids being right, but with their parents eating the monster because, apparently, they're the monsters that feast on other monsters.

 These endings, though weird and kind of creepy, didn't keep me up at night. They didn't have me double guessing what that shadow on my wall could be.

Are You Afraid of the Dark, on the other hand, did. One story that has stayed with me all these years is one that stars Tia and Tamara Mowry (the twins from Sister, Sister). They didn’t play sisters in this story, Tia played a normal girl and Tamara played a chameleon that attempted and succeeded in taking her place. I remember how unsettled I felt when Tamara’s character pulled a basket of chameleons out of a well and commented on how lonely Tia’s character (transformed into a chameleon) must be trapped in a well in her backyard.

Those stories scared the crap out of me as a kid and it didn't help that it was the last thing that aired on SNICK before Nickelodeon switched to Nick at Night. While Goosebumps aired in the afternoon with plenty of daylight streaming through the living room, we had to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark just as we were winding down, forcing us to have keep those kid-sized horrors in our minds as we went to bed.

Although both shows dealt with the paranormal and the bizarre and are classified as horror, they seem to do different things, giving us glimpses into the different ways horror may function and appeal to the different facets of an audience.

Goosebumps appealed to the audience that would grow up to seek humor and some gore in their horror stories; the ones who would grow up to appreciate Freddy Krueger. Are You Afraid of the Dark appealed to the audience that would grow up to seek out darker stories, ghost stories, the ones that make you wonder about the things that exist in the corner of your eye, the ones that stick with you long after the lights come on.

Years later my brother and I have come to agree that neither show is better than the other. Ultimately it comes down to taste. He prefers humor and the mildly grotesque and I prefer to be driven into insomnia.