Top Spine-Tingling Are You Afraid of the Dark Episodes

“The Tale of the Dead Man’s Float” was one of the later episodes of the initial run, and all you need to really do is look at that photo again to understand why it’s so disturbing. Are You Afraid of the Dark plays with the fear of something in the water waiting to pull you under and combines it with the classic trope of a vengeful spirit.

Are You Afraid of the Dark often took well-known urban legends and repurposed them in a new, contemporary setting for kids, which is especially impressive given the low budget. The monster in this episode is the most disgusting to appear, but it’s not the most terrifying, as there’s another major fear that the show loved to play with over and over.

Combining comic books, alternate realities, and evil clowns, “The Tale of the Ghastly Grinner” is a packed episode centered around the villainous Grinner. When teenager Ethan Wood gets his hands on a one-of-a-kind comic book, the Ghastly Grinner slowly starts seeping into our world, making adults go crazy with blue slime dripping from their mouths as they laugh uncontrollably.

Are You Afraid Of The Dark never talks down to its young audience, even with episodes like this that present the concept of a comic book being a guidebook to combating evil in alternate realities. The Ghastly Grinner is a terrifying design, but it’s the mocking laughter which heralds his arrival that is pure nightmare fuel.

As you can guess by the picture, “The Tale of the Midnight Ride” starts off with Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, before moving to the present of the early 90s. Are You Afraid of the Dark frequently took urban legends and classic horror stories as inspiration, but there’s something about the Headless Horseman that is terrifying no matter where he turns up.

After two students give Ichabod Crane the right directions through the forest as he’s doomed to repeat his Halloween ride for eternity, but this act of kindness makes them take his place as the quarry of the Horseman. The chase scenes are scary, but it’s the haunting ending, which is sort-of happy and sort-of depressing, that leaves an impression.

Are You Afraid of the Dark proves with the “The Tale of Locker 22” that not all ghosts are inherently scary, with Candy, a hippie student from the 60s, haunting a new transfer student named Julie. Julie finds that she can travel back to the 1960s when she wears Candy’s necklace, becoming Candy in the past, which is a problem since well…Candy is a ghost…which means she died.

Here, the tension isn’t from a terrifying monster, it’s from the grim realization that you can’t mess with fate. Or can you? The stakes are fairly low, but knowing something is going to go horribly wrong hangs over the episode like a funeral shroud.

What starts as an initiation ritual to hang out with a group of girls takes a turn when the strange house in town turns out to really be haunted. The Lonely Ghost, a young girl that can only manifest when someone walks into a portal in her room, doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but that doesn’t make her any less creepy.

Are You Afraid of the Dark made the little girl ghost creepy years before The Ring terrified audiences. Unlike some of the other entries on the list, there’s a happy ending; in fact, it’s a very happy ending, but the journey to get there is….unsettling.

Episodes with happy endings help to balance out the darkness of episodes like “The Tale of the Dark Music,” which involves a Faustian bargain with a supernatural being living in the basement. Well, that’s actually putting it too gently, as Faust loses out in the end, but Are You Afraid of the Dark goes with the darkest possible ending.

Andy realizes the menacing being, which takes the form of a creepy doll, a circus barker, and a tornado of demonic energy, never revealing its true nature, is controlled by music. Instead of trying to get rid of the haunting entity, he uses it to get revenge against the neighborhood bully. The final shot is one of the most terrifying in the series’ entire run and is up there with some Twilight Zone episodes.

A fun but scary episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark asks the question, “What if moves were real?” Just like The Last Action Hero, unwitting kids get sucked into a movie, but there’s no Arnold Schwarzenegger this time, just Nosferatu.

The rundown theater thinks that Dr. Vink, an eccentric inventor, can save the business, but that’s a lie, as he unleashes Nosferatu on our world. Pete and Katie, two young friends, figure out how to defeat the vampire (spoiler: it involves sunlight), but the episode ends with horrible laughter for a reason. This episode also predates vampires as “dark and sexy,” with Nosferatu looking the part of a proper Lord of Darkness.

Are You Afraid of the Dark was a success from the very start, with the show’s second episode topping the list, and it’s for a very good reason. See that photo? That’s right, clowns are scary, have always been scary, and will always be scary.

This time it’s worse, as the clown is also a ghost, the lingering spirit of a 1920s clown that stole the carnival’s payroll and took cover in a funhouse to evade the police. When Josh steals the clown’s nose to prove that he isn’t scared, he learns that Zeebo isn’t trapped in the funhouse and that there’s only one way to save himself from the terrifying clown ghost.

“The Tale of Laughing in the Dark” is filled with misdirects, jump scares, slow-boiling scares, and an iconic villain that defined the series for a generation. That’s why it’s not only the scariest episode, but the best.