Are you afraid of the dark? Children’s horror anthology series in the 1990s

Children's horror anthology series are significant cultural artefacts of the shifting relations between child and adult culture in the 1990s. This chapter considers how children's horror programs draw upon adult horror genres to develop carefully calibrated processes of affectual engagement, seeking to horrify within the acceptable bounds of mainstream children's entertainment. It presents the children's horror anthology series within the context of the North American television landscape at the end of the twentieth century, a period that saw a range of major changes in the television industry and concurrently the genre vaguely defined as children's television. The chapter suggests that the children's horror anthology series navigated–and incited–a range of conceptual and cultural contortions surrounding the disintegration of traditional ideas about children's television. In tandem, the horror anthology series, particularly Goosebumps, became the locus for concerns that children's culture was becoming increasingly commodified during this period, an issue around which potent cultural anxieties about childhood constellated during the 1990s.