Are You Afraid of the Dark? (The Tale of the Dream Girl)

A shockingly well-executed episode. Enjoying AYAOTD nowadays usually involves having a taste for cheese washed down with inordinately-frightening imagery for a show to be played next to silly cartoons, but “Dream Girl” succeeds by making the most of its great idea and trusting its young cast to carry so much more emotional weight than this show often asks. It’s good enough, in fact, that one Internet myth that refuses to die posits a major motion film took inspiration directly from this episode. It’s easy enough to debunk, but the episode is so good that the claim comes across as verisimilitudinous.

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