Horror anthology Are You Afraid of the Dark? returning as miniseries at Nickelodeon

To celebrate the upcoming Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie from Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon is bringing back the classic horror anthology back to TV as a miniseries this fall. The miniseries will air on Nick in October, just in time for Halloween.

Running for a total of seven seasons between 1990 and 2000, the show told terrifying tales of the supernatural via the Midnight Society, a group of kids who would gather in the dead of night around a roaring campfire to swap narratives. At the end of each episode, a member of the Society would put out the fire, the resulting smoke eerily closing out the story.

Reviving the show, however briefly, is a really smart move on Nickelodeon's part as it gives fans (new and old) a chance to get acquainted (or re-acquainted) with the concept just before the film drops. 

Written by Gary Dauberman (It: Chapters 1 & 2), the Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie will hit theaters on Oct. 11 of this year. D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye) is expected to direct. 

While the original series got away with a lot of scary stuff that any a kids' network might not be able to do today, Dauberman promised last year that his script would not dilute the series' creep factor, which is loved by many kids that came of age in the 1990s.

"That show is so important to me," he said. "I didn’t want to age it down too much because for it’s time, it had some really disturbing episodes and some really dark episodes. Not every story the Midnight Society told ended with happily ever after or a person learning their lesson and it will never happen again. I really embraced that side of things and I think it’s been a long time. I think fear is healthy for kids. I don’t think we have to always sand down the edges of things and that’s something I really wanted to do with Are You Afraid of the Dark? I think it is scary and I think kids will be scared watching it at times, and also they’ll laugh at times. I think it’s got a great message. I think it’s got a great heart to it but it is still scary. I think that’s great. I think it’s going to open it up to a wider audience."

The show's return is just the latest development in Nick's initiative to appeal to the millennial crowd — not that we're complaining; keep the '90s revivals coming! In November of 2017, Hey Arnold! finally got a series finale, Rugrats is receiving new life, and just this week, the network announced that it was rebooting sketch series All That and working on a connected universe of SpongeBob spinoffs.