To whom it may concern

In 1992, there were plenty of young girls who loved horror — but most horror producers just didn’t seem to care. Take my word for it; I was 10 then, with a newly minted taste for the creepy, and a potent combination of parental neglect and basic cable left me free to surf the airwaves each night. I couldn’t get enough of the era’s goofy, gory horror on shows like Amazing Stories and the syndicated Nightmare on Elm Street spin-off, Freddy’s Nightmare. But as I wiled away my nights watching ghosts terrorize horny teens and Brad Pitt get shot with an arrow, I noticed a pattern: On TV, girls were almost never the heroes.

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When MacHale first developed the show with partner Ned Kandel, they had planned it as a series of bedtime stories. But the pair hit a roadblock: They realized bedtime stories were actually incredibly boring. What had they actually liked as kids? “Scary stories,” says MacHale. So they changed course, shifting the show’s focus to horror and thrillers for kids — a practically nonexistent genre at the time. It took a year to sell Nickelodeon executives on it, but by 1992 the show was airing weekly in the U.S., just in time to be part of a kids’ horror golden age that included Beetlejuice the Animated Series (1989-1990), Eerie, Indiana (1991-2), the original Addams Family films (1991 & 1993), and Goosebumps (1992).

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