Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Prom Queen

And, in this episode, Kristen (Rachel Blanchard) dresses up in a veil and comes to the Midnight Society late to tell a story that she claims is ancient, and has been retold many times. I was expecting them to pull a twist where a real ghost had replaced Kristen, or make the ending ambiguous. But, nope, she breaks character moments into the episode. Furthermore, this is a story about a Prom Queen’s ghost, so how old could it actually be? This is yet another episode where the introduction seems almost random, and unrelated to the story being told.

Regarding the story, I’m not sure if I’m unusual in my susceptibility to a particular type of twist, or if it’s true of most people: I tend to see the main character as an audience surrogate. So, if you want to get one over on me, just make the twist “the protagonist isn’t who were were led to believe he or she was.” This is how the film Lucky Number Slevin got me, despite the hints. It’s also how this episode got me, despite even more obvious hints.

To go through the basics: We have a protagonist, Dede (Katie Griffin), who says she’s from out of town, shows up shortly before a prom queen’s ghost is set to reappear, is unfamiliar with modern technology, immediately agrees to go on a ghost hunt with two local boys (Graeme Millington and Andre Todorovic), and is shocked when she learns that the prom queen’s boyfriend died shortly after the queen herself. Oh, and her plan to deal with the ghost? Convince her boyfriend’s spirit to come and pick her up, as she was apparently hit by a truck when he didn’t get a message to come for her.

And that’s just an over-view. Going scene-by-scene I could break down how every single moment of this episode screams “she’s a ghost!” Analyzing the actual plot is much simpler than analyzing the hints: She’s at a cemetery, she meets the two boys named Jam and Greg. Jam tells her the story of a prom queen who died in an accident because her boyfriend didn’t know to pick her up. They team up, and go to the library to see if there are any records of such an incident, and find that there are...and that the boyfriend, Ricky (Matthew MacKay) died in a crash shortly afterward (the episode leaves it unclear if this was suicide, or an accident caused by his emotional state). They hold a séance at the river where he died, and something strange starts moving in the water and chases them.

Returning to the cemetery at the appropriate time, a cloaked figure appears, and Greg confronts it to find...Jam’s cousin Chuck (Amyas Godfrey) playing a prank...and then Ricky shows up in a car, and Judy magically changes into her prom dress. Surprise! And it got me. Dede was a nickname for Judy, the name of the girl who died.

I do have to give this episode credit for all the hints. While Dede’s demeanor was never quite that of a girl from fifty years in the past, a fair amount of outdated slang was thrown in. Also, her clothes were simple enough to keep her temporal location ambiguous. They were probably a bit masculine for a woman in the fifties, but they likely could have at least existed in that time period.

Is the episode scary? Not really. Not supposed to be. Ghosts exist...and they’re perfectly fine people. They mean no one harm. The show does seem to equate “supernatural” with “scary,” which isn’t always the case, but it works as a story.