A classic children’s horror series beat the sixth sense to its climax by 5 years

Horror fans have their share of traditions every Halloween, usually centered around annual reruns of our favorite films, trips to haunted attractions, eating absurdist-themed snacks, and celebrating the scream season with fun costumes. What a person watches each fall varies from person to person (although John Carpenter’s “Halloween” is required. Sorry, it’s the law), but one of my annual traditions is to rewatch the full season of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” from Nickelodeon.

For the uninitiated, “Are you afraid of the dark?” was a Canadian horror anthology series created by DJ MacHale and Ned Kandel that aired on Nickelodeon in the 1990s, inspiring two revival series, the most recent of which ran from 2019 to 2022. In the original series, each episode was presented as a spooky story told around the campfire as part of the nightly ritual of The Midnight Society, a group of preteens and teenagers resembling a “Breakfast Club” brought together across the barriers of social cliques by a shared love of horror storytelling.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” served as a gateway to a generation of young people’s burgeoning love of all things horror, and while not every story was a home run (Looking at You, “The Tale of Manaha”), there are a handful of landmark episodes that have 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 of “The Tale of the Ghastly Grinner” or the truly nightmarish pool ghoul from “The Tale of the Dead Man’s Float” are cited as among 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 film arrived. theaters.

Episode 10 of Season 3 of “Are You Afraid of the Dark” is the story “The Tale of the Dream Girl”, a tale presented to the Midnight Society by Sam (JoAnna Garcia Swisher). She tells the group that this is not a story about monsters or demons, but about love. The story centers on siblings Johnny and Erica, who spend time together and even work together at their local bowling alley. One day, Johnny finds a class ring in his work locker and tries it on, but the ring gets stuck on his finger.

Suddenly, he begins to have visions of the ring’s owner, a beautiful girl named Donna, who is also the ghost of a teenage girl who died in a car accident. Johnny feels very ignored by everyone in his life except his sister, and the more he interacts with Donna, the more he realizes that she is the girl of his dreams. Alas, as he is a ghost, they will never be able to be together, and he asks her to leave him alone. Donna tells Johnny that she won’t bother him anymore, and suddenly the ring comes off her finger.

Johnny decides to “return” the ring to her by leaving it on her grave, where he meets her sister Erica. She finally tells the truth and tells Johnny that he was Donna’s boyfriend before they did it. both died in a car accident, and all this time he was a ghost that only Erica could see. Johnny’s feeling of being ignored was unfounded because the reality is that the people who were flat out ignoring him didn’t see it. It’s a kid-friendly version of Bruce Willis’s Malcolm Crowe hosting sad birthday dinners with his grieving wife in “The Sixth Sense,” and it makes for one of the best-written episodes of the series.

The similarities were so striking that Wikipedia and IMDb both claimed at times that “The Sixth Sense” was directly inspired by the episode. ScreenCrush asked M. Night Shyamalan in 2017 if “The Tale of the Dream Girl” inspired his breakthrough film, and he replied, “I’m afraid I don’t know that series!” The interviewer rightly pointed out that this internet rumor seemed to be born from an assumption, as there was never a source for this claim. “I don’t want to ignore something that may have had an influence, but nothing means anything to you when you say that,” he said, noting that it was the first time he had heard of the series.

I fully believe that Shyamalan had not seen “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” and this is yet another example of parallel thinking, but that doesn’t stop online aggregate sites from peddling rumor as fact. Series creator DJ MacHale has often said that he figured out the twist in “The Sixth Sense” fairly early on, given the film’s similar approach to hiding the ghostly reveal to that of “The Tale of the Dream Girl.” Either way, once you know the twist, it makes for fantastic replay because every moment and interaction takes on a completely different meaning. If there is any inspiration, however, “The Tale of the Dream Girl” was openly directly inspired by Mark Dinning’s 1959 song “Teen Angel,” about a young couple killed after their car stalled on the railroad tracks, with a class ring found clutched in the girl’s hands.

Unfortunately, “The Tale of the Dream Girl” is one of the rare episodes of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” is not available for streaming on Paramount+, but it is available for purchase on VOD services and uploaded by some independent curators to YouTube.