MIDNIGHT LIZARD VS DARK READER SERIES
MIDNIGHT LIZARD VS DARK READER TV
MIDNIGHT LIZARD VS DARK READER FREE

In order to film so many scenes in such a short time, MacHale had to have a pretty good idea of the story of each episode long before production on each season began. 'It was a huge set and we didn’t have a huge budget, so we had to maximize having built that set,' MacHale says. The campfire scenes that bookended each episode were filmed on a soundstage in Montreal MacHale and his team would typically have about a week and a half to complete an entire season's worth, to preserve the elaborate forest set the crew had built. So, I took that title and thought, ‘Well, I was afraid of clowns and I was afraid of the dark…' And that’s where the title came from.' Each season's Midnight Society scenes were shot all at once Seuss … called What Was I Scared Of?, and I always loved that story. Seuss, he inspired the name of the series, originally Scary Tales (a twist on 'fairy tales'), which Nickelodeon said wasn’t 'Nickelodeon enough.' MacHale explained to Splitsider, 'There was a scary story written by Dr. While that didn’t happen, at least a couple of episodes featured literary influences: season three’s 'The Tale of the Phone Police,' for instance, contained echoes of George Orwell’s 1984, and season two’s 'The Tale of the Dream Machine' had some plot threads in common with Stephen King’s short story 'Word Processor of the Gods.'Īs for Dr. So, MacHale says, they turned each episode into 'Hitchcock 101, which was all the tension - but if there was a gushy thing happening it would happen off camera.' The line each Midnight Society member used to introduce the week's tale - 'Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society' - was an homage to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone.Įarly in the show's conception phase, as MacHale first told Splitsider in 2012, Nickelodeon had suggested that he and Kandel could base each scary story on a work of classic literature, which could help diffuse the heat if parents complained that the tales were too frightening.

MIDNIGHT LIZARD VS DARK READER FREE

Though MacHale and his partner Ned Kandel had pretty free rein from Nickelodeon, they couldn’t depict real gore on the show. Its influences ranged from Alfred Hitchcock to Dr. Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, here are a few things you might not know about the seminal tween spookfest.

MacHale about what went into producing the show.

MIDNIGHT LIZARD VS DARK READER SERIES

In honor of the show's imminent return to television, I chatted with series creator (and writer and director) turned YA novelist D.J. It created countless coulrophobics and incited enough scares to burn itself permanently into many young brains.

MIDNIGHT LIZARD VS DARK READER TV

The show’s construct - a horror anthology series for kids - may have seemed a tall order at first, but it ran for seven seasons and become one of Nickelodeon’s highest-rated properties no subsequent TV series has quite occupied its niche since it went off the air. Among the lineup (which Caroline Framke breaks down here) is the spooky-story series Are You Afraid of the Dark, which went off the air more than 15 years ago but has lived on via YouTube videos - and returns to TV tonight (at midnight, appropriately enough). In late September, Nickelodeon announced it would officially begin pandering to our collective '90s nostalgia with the Splat, an all-night block of Nick’s top '90s programming that launched on TeenNick this week.

Midnight lizard vs dark reader