TV Shows I Grew Up On: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Continuing with the Nickelodeon theme, another great show I watched as a kid was Are You Afraid of the Dark?  I'm not asking a question...that's its name...The general premise of the show is that a bunch of kids, members of The Midnight Society, sit around a campfire telling each other scary/bizarre/supernatural stories.  Each episode was one of those stories played out for the viewer.  Occasionally the story would be interrupted by the other Midnight Society members, which reminded you this was being told around a campfire.  It always started and ended at the campfire and (as in most kid show fashion) the story would generally be relevant to what one of the kids was doing at the beginning of the story (if one of the kids was being a jerk, the story would be about someone being a jerk getting punished in a scary way, etc.).

I loved this show because of how varied the stories were and how not every story was scary.  Some were just paranormal without any kids being in danger.  Then there were the ones with the clowns...this probably is part of the cause for my aversion to clowns.  This and Tim Curry.  It probably also helps that one of the very first episodes I saw had lizard people and a giant sewer dragon/lizard thing.  The Goosebumps TV show came out near the end of this show, but it wasn't comparable at all other than they were both scary story shows.  This show was far superior in every way.

Movies I Grew Up On: Night of the Living Dead

I always thought I watched this when I was like 5 or 6, but clearly that couldn't have happened since it came out in 1990, but I completely blame Night of the Living Dead for my aversion to watching anything zombie related.  I did watch this when I was little and ever since then, zombies have become one of those things that if I let my mind stick on it, I'll start getting jumpy, and if it's at night...well...that's going to be a miserable night.  I'm fairly certain it was the 1990 version and not the original 1968 version, but I haven't gone back and watched either of them to confirm this.  I honestly don't even remember much from the actual movie.  There were zombies, there was a farm, people were boarding up a house, there was yelling, there was glass breaking, etc.

Because of this movie and the effect it had on me, I now flat out refuse to watch zombie movies (every once in awhile I get convinced to break this rule and almost always suffer for it), read zombie books (I do really want to read World War Z, but I can't imagine that going well for me), or play zombie focused games (broke this rule to play Dead Island, but could only play it in short bursts when there was daylight outside).  Sometimes people will try to convince me to watch zombie things to get me over my fear, but I'm not really sure I see the point.  Everyone is afraid of something.  If the worst thing I'm afraid of are zombies, then I'm pretty well off, since I'm highly unlikely to ever see them, and if I do I almost guarantee I'll be one of the first to die or else I'll be the guy that helps someone else hide their zombie wound and gets us all killed.