Badmovies.org Forum

When I was growing up, I had these shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark or Goosebumps that were basically Twilight Zone/Tales from The Crypt for little kids.  They were freaky as hell and rather distrubing.  In recent years, they are a bit cheesy and silly, but still enjoyable in there own ways.  Looking back on them, you wouldn't believe who appeared in them or even started their careers in those series.  For example, Ryan Gossling from Drive first appeared in both series as a young kid.  It's weird.

Nowadays, you don't get these horrors series for kids.  I remember them trying to bring this back in the early 2000's with The Nightmare Room, which had tons of kid to teen actors in it that I recongized.  However, that show only lasted 13 episodes and was ended.  So that was that for these types of shows... until recently.  I present to you, R. L. Stine's Haunting Hour.

R.L. Stine is of course the creator behind Goosebumps and The Nightmare Room, so it was nice to see him create another series like this.  The idea is the same with the rest of the series, they are one to two episode stories with different characters and different stories.  There's always something scary or of fantastic nature to them.  The thing I find most shocking about this series however is that it is most freaky and disturbing than most of the kid horror series of the past.  I can't go into details (you should watch the show for yourself or with your kids), but I'll spoil one of the episodes:

Dreamcatcher: One girl at summer camp gets jealous of her friend befriending another girl. As a result leaves their cabin to sleep by herself out of spite. When the friend gets trapped by a dream lurking monster, said girl leaves the new friend to deal with it, pretends to come help in dreamland to help only to ditch the new friend out of spite, shows up when the rescue fails to gloat a bit and leave them to die at the hands of the spider creature, then trips and falls into a trap herself. Karma strikes hard when one of the girls' alarm clocks goes off, waking them up and saving them, leaving the jealous girl to get eaten by the spider creature (she couldn't wake up because she slept outside and couldn't hear the alarm).

And that's pretty light in comparison to a lot of the other episodes.  Also, Circus, if you are there, I'm sure you'll get a kick out of the Afraid of Clowns episode.  Anyhow, I thought I share that with you guys.  The show is on The Hub and can be watched from the main website I think.