Are You Afraid of the Dark?/YMMV

The TV Show

• Actually Pretty Scary: While a lot of the show was the type of "scares you as kids, but not when older" softball you'd expect from a low-budget children's horror anthology series, even a few hard-core horror blogs admit that the show occasionally stumbled upon a really scary story (not surprising, since more than a few were adapted from older not-kid-friendly horror stories such as "The Monkey's Paw.")
• Critical Research Failure: Possibly a They Just Didn't Care, the chameleons used in "Tale of the Chameleon" were actually young iguanas. Which look nothing like chameleons.
  • Or it could have been more pragmatic. There were a couple of scenes where the reptile in question needed to scamper pretty quickly, and since chameleons are slow moving, they decided to pick something that was faster.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The final, ReTooled season for many.
• Narm: Bless its heart, so very much.
• Nightmare Fuel: In both the show and the video game, of course. This show was surprisingly dark for a kids' show in the early 90s.
• Older Than They Think: "The Tale of the Dream Girl" was actually M. Night Shyamalan's inspiration for The Sixth Sense, one of the most acclaimed movies ever made. For its originality.
  • "The Tale of the Quiet Librarian" inspired a Buffy episode called "Hush".
  • The Twilight Zone episode "A Most Unusual Camera" was the basis for both "The Tale of the Curious Camera" and Goosebumps: Say Cheese and Die!.
  • The Twisted Claw episode was inspired by a story called "The Monkey's Paw".
• Special Effects Failure: Due to the low budget, practically every episode. The one that stands out the most was an episode where a bunch of kids were kidnapped onto an alien spacecraft and forced to eat a horrible alien food product... which was clearly and obviously lime-flavoured jello in a bowl.
  • This ended up being beneficial in ways as episodes often had to use frightening ideas and imagery(e.g. a girl suddenly standing on the other side of the window in the middle of the night) rather than special effects, which made it scarier.
• What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Well it is, but death is thrown around freely that it becomes pretty disturbing for a youngster.

The Video Game

• Uncanny Valley: The wax statues, especially the wax audience.