An ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ Movie Is In Development With ‘IT’ Screenwriter
You know what nostalgic era film and TV hasn’t revisited yet? The 1990s! Just kidding. Everything is the ’90s today, and that’s not stopping anytime soon: Paramount has just greenlit a movie based on popular ’90s Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark? and one of the screenwriters behind this year’s breakout horror movie IT is working on it.
The Hollywood Reporter announced that Gary Dauberman, who wrote both IT and Annabelle: Creation, will write and produce a movie based on the popular anthology series that terrorized a generation of kids cursed with overactive imaginations. Each story in Are You Afraid of the Dark? was told by a group of kids sitting around a campfire who call themselves the Midnight Society, and they ranged from fairy tale retellings to stories featuring vampires and werewolves.
Dauberman spoke to THR about how excited he was about the project and the “darker, scarier” aspect of the show he hopes to bring into the movie.
The show is about the shared experience of telling stories — especially scary ones. We're going to celebrate that with this movie and honor the darker, scarier tone of the show, which was really groundbreaking for Nickelodeon at the time. I hope the Midnight Society approves.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? is the kind of thing that would lend itself well to a movie format that contained a bunch of different stories, or one that focused on one particularly scary tale and simultaneously played off the dynamic of the kids of the Midnight Society. Both IT and Annabelle: Creation are at their strongest when they focus on the friendships between children, so Dauberman is probably the perfect man for this job.
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