'Are You Afraid Of The Dark' Clip Takes You To A Creepy Carnival

The new Are You Afraid of the Dark? reboot is arriving this week, just in time for Halloween season. A whole-new Midnight Society will gather to tell some scary stories – only this time, the stories are coming to life. A new, and surprisingly long, Are You Afraid of the Dark clip brings the Midnight Society together at a creepy carnival. Plus: the reboot's writer spills the beans on the many horror references fans will encounter along the way.

When I was a young lad, Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a big deal. I was obsessed with all-things-spooky, and the horror anthology series aimed at younger viewers scratched that itch. The production values weren't the best, and the stories themselves weren't even that scary. But damn it, the show tried, and it was fun to spend some time with the Midnight Society as they told their tales of terror.

Now here comes the Are You Afraid of the Dark? reboot miniseries. This three-part event was originally supposed to lead directly into a new Are You Afraid of the Dark? feature film. But that status of that film is up in the air at the moment, so we'll just have to make do with this. In the original Are You Afraid of the Dark?, the Midnight Society simply told the stories and sat the action out. This miniseries changes things, having the group of youngsters in the Midnight Society having to face horrors head-on after their scary stories come to life. Also, as you can see in the clip above, there's a carnival involved, which means clowns show up. Spooky!

Are You Afraid of the Dark? writer BenDavid Grabinski spoke with Bloody Disgusting about the upcoming miniseries and revealed that horror fans can expect a bunch of references packed into the three episodes. "It's all very, very deeply nerdy but in a way that if you don't know the references you won't know [they're] references," Grabinski said, adding:

"The kids' names are Rachel Carpenter, Graham Raimi, Gavin Coscarelli, Louise Fulci and then Akiko Yamato, and then her brother is Officer Hideo Yamato, which is [referencing] Hideo Kojima...So a bunch of just deeply nerdy stuff," Grabinski says. "There's a bad guy in the show, you'll find out his real last name is Cochran because I really like Halloween III...It's one of those things where it's like, it passed the smell test. I have a thousand references in it and no one on set knew they were references, which to me is the magical level. It's like some movies where it's like, here's Officer Spielberg and Romero, and I'm like, 'Well, that's a little too much.' We all have our own internal barometer over what is too much and what is corny or too obscure."

Are You Afraid of the Dark? premieres the first of its three episodes on October 11.

Across the three hour-long episodes, the series follows members of an entirely new Midnight Society, who tell a terrifying tale of the Carnival of Doom and its evil ringmaster Mr. Tophat, only to witness the shocking story come frightfully to life.