Are You Afraid of the Dark? was an early '90s Nickelodeon show about a group of teens who gathered in the woods to tell each other scary stories (instead of doing drugs and having sex, which is what teenagers actually do in the woods). Most of the stories were hilariously cheesy, but a few episodes had some truly unsettling subtexts presumably meant to warn kids about the terrible lives most of them were doomed to lead.

5 "The Tale of the Dangerous Soup"

A chef locks people in a room with a plastic gargoyle statue that scares Jolly Green Giant pee from their bodies. He then uses this liquid fear to make soup. For some reason.



"It tastes way better than Campbell's."

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It's Really About:

The rich literally getting fat off of the poor. Zeusbeard McTerror owns a restaurant that serves fear soup for a hundred bucks a bowl while employing a revolving door of downtrodden minimum wage workers who double as livestock providing the secret ingredient for his bastardly bisque. His underemployed workforce is in the unique position of being exploited by both sides of the transaction.