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

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.

Season 3 episode 10 of "Are You Afraid of the Dark" is the story "The Tale of the Dream Girl," a tale brought to the Midnight Society by Sam (JoAnna Garcia Swisher). She tells the group that it's a tale not about monsters or demons, but about love. The story centers on siblings Johnny and Erica, who hang out together all the time 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 starts having 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 has been feeling very ignored by everyone in his life other than his sister these days, and the more he interacts with Donna, the more he realizes that she's his dream girl. Alas, as she's a ghost, they'll never be able to be together, and he asks her to leave him alone. Donna tells Johnny she won't bother him any longer, and suddenly the ring comes off his finger.

Johnny decides to "return" the ring to her by leaving it at her grave, where he runs into his sister Erica. She finally comes clean and tells Johnny that he was Donna's boyfriend before they both died in a car accident, and he has been a ghost this whole time that only Erica could see. Johnny's feelings of being ignored were unfounded because the reality is that the people ignoring him straight up didn't see him. It's a kid-friendly version of Bruce Willis' Malcolm Crowe having sad anniversary dinners with his grieving wife in "The Sixth Sense," and it makes for one of the series' best-written episodes.

The similarities were so striking that Wikipedia and IMDb both claimed at some points that "The Sixth Sense" was directly inspired by the episode. M. Night Shyamalan was asked by ScreenCrush in 2017 if "The Tale of the Dream Girl" had inspired his breakthrough film at all, and he responded, "I'm afraid I don't know that show!" The interviewer rightfully identified that this internet rumor seemed to be born out of an assumption, because there was never a source for the claim. "I don't want to ignore something that might have been an influence, but nothing rings a bell when you say that," he said, noting that the interview was the first time he had ever heard of the show.

I fully believe Shyamalan hadn't 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 the rumor as fact. Series creator D.J. MacHale has frequently said that he figured out the twist of "The Sixth Sense" pretty early, given the film's similar approach to hiding the ghostly revelation to that of "The Tale of the Dream Girl." In both cases, once you know the twist, it makes for a fantastic re-watch because every moment and interaction takes on a completely different meaning. If there's 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 train tracks, with a class ring found clutched in the girl's hands. 

Sadly, "The Tale of the Dream Girl" is one of a handful of episodes of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" not available to stream on Paramount+, but it is available for purchase on VOD services and uploaded by some independent preservationists on YouTube.