Both series of Are You Afraid of the Dark? revolves around a group of teenagers who referred to themselves as The Midnight Society . Every week, at a secret location in the woods, one member would tell a scary story to the group. The actual story, rather than the telling, was displayed to the television viewer. The story was shown between the group's arrival at the site and their departure. Each storyteller would begin their story by saying Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this story... at which point they would toss out a handful of regular sugar[1](which the characters referred to as midnight dust ) from a leather pouch into a campfire to heighten the flames and produce an eerie white smoke. The storyteller would continue by announcing its title (The Tale of...).
Many of the horror stories on Are You Afraid of the Dark? ended with a happy ending ; for example, in the episode The Tale of the Lonely Ghost, a dead child and her elderly mother are reunited. Nearly every story focused on ending with a resolution and the main character's safe escape from whatever trouble had come upon them.
However, the occasional episode would deviate from this formula, usually ending with the demise of the character. In one notable case, The Tale of the Dark Music , the unseen monster offers the lead character anything he wants in exchange for humans as food. Another, more extreme example, is seen in The Tale of Vampire Town , where the lead character, a goth character who is obsessed with vampires, abandons the dark clothing and such by the end of the episode, only to be killed by a vampire himself.
At the end of most episodes, one character (usually Gary in the first run and Tucker in the second run of the show) would throw a red bucket of water onto the fire, stating I declare this meeting of the Midnight Society closed, and the group would leave the campsite, thus ending the storytelling. Sometimes, the story would be related to an event (e.g. in The Tale of Laughing in the Dark, Kristen, who was afraid of clowns, ran off when Eric put on a clown mask. Then, everyone chased after her). This would cause either Gary or Tucker to hurriedly dump the water on the fire and the Midnight Society would run off to wherever they go after meetings.
