Here we are. The first ever episode of Nickelodeon’s seminal nightmare fuel classic, Are You Afraid of the Dark.
This episode begins different than the rest, with Gary introducing the concept of the show: a group of kids with nothing in common except their occasionally unsettling passion for scary stories. If they go to different schools and don’t have any overlapping interests or mutual friends, how do they even know each other? Did they all just happen upon the campfire and decide to start telling ghost stories on a whim? Or did Gary go to all the neighboring schools and recruit them, Professor X style? Starting the show off with nothing but questions.
The Tale of the Phantom Cab is Frank’s initiation story, making him the first new member of the Midnight Society to be admitted on the show. Frank can only be described as incredibly abrasive. Patently unlikeable characters FTW.
So this story is about a pair of brothers named Buzz and Denny (whose parents are apparently horrible, because seriously, Buzz and Denny?) who go hiking and get lost. Buzz is a whiny little nerd and Denny is a giant bag of dicks. But honestly, no matter how mean Denny is to his little brother, it’s kind of justified because Buzz is straight up incompetent.
He drops the map in a puddle, needs to be rescued after walking off the edge of a cliff, and worst of all, says, “Man, this is whacked!” unironically. And it doesn’t help that the child actors they had on the show at the beginning weren’t exactly trained professionals.
So it’s getting dark and cold, and it turns out genius child prodigy Buzz here has been stubbornly using his compass wrong the whole time. It probably wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if natural selection just took care of these two the old-fashioned way.
While they’re wandering through the woods, they run into a creepy named Flynn who gives them every possible reason not to trust him. Despite this, they follow him to Dr Vink’s house, where I’m sure nothing bad has ever happened to vulnerable children.
That’s right: Dr Vink, with a vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh!
And although they absolutely under no circumstances should go into Dr Vink’s cottage of terrors, of course they do.
Like many creepy old men who live in the woods, Dr Vink is only willing to help them if they play along with his weird little games. In this case, it seems relatively harmless. He asks them a riddle: if they get it right, they can use his phone; if not, they have to leave. But are you really going to take his man at his word, and trust him not to make a human suit out of your cold dead body?
Apparently if you’re Buzz and Denny, the answer is yes. Predictably, they don’t know the answer to the riddle, and are sent away with the promise that they’ll be met by a taxi.
Surprise #1: The taxi actually comes.
Surprise #2: It’s being driven by Flynn, the mysterious guy from the woods we met earlier.
Surprise #3: Flynn is super dead.
Surprise #4: They’re going to die too, unless they can solve the riddle before Flynn wraps his taxi around a tree.
Luckily, Buzz is better at riddles than he is at acting, so they survive, breaking the curse in the process and freeing the spirits of all the other people who went to Dr Vink to help and got killed in Flynn’s taxi.
I don’t remember being too scared by this episode even when I was a kid, and looking back as an adult there’s not too much to make me change my opinion. The Tale of the Phantom Cab is undeniably one of the more lightweight episodes of the early seasons. The story is overly simplistic, even for children, and the acting doesn’t help matters.
Still, there’s something about the concept of kids sitting around a campfire trying to scare the crap out of each other that is immediately engaging, and its easy to see how Are You Afraid of the Dark would grow and develop from here.
Scariest Moment: When Flynn is driving the cab, telling the story about his encounter with Dr Vink, then suddenly his head does a full-on Exorcist twist as he maniacally yells, “I SORTA DIED!” Yeah no thank you.
4 Amputated Hands out of 10
Next Up: The Tale of Laughing in the Dark
Audrey Is Afraid of the Dark 