Nick's new Are You Afraid Of The Dark? trailer is here for all your unfulfilled murder-clown needs

It’s a spooky-clown-y time in America these days, what with your Its and your Wrinkles running around all over the place, scaring the shit out of children in both murderous and non-murderous contexts. Still, we have to ask: Where are the wholesome murder clowns of our youth? Like the kind you might see on Nickelodeon’s old horror anthology series Are You Afraid Of The Dark?: About 10 degrees scarier than you might expect from a Nick show, sure, but never so scary you’d have to develop a life-long phobia of balloons.

As it turns out, said horror circus staffers are still hanging out in the world of AYAOTD?, as made clear in the first full trailer for the show’s new revival series. As the earlier teaser for the project suggested, this new incarnation of the Midnight Society and its members finds themselves in some rather meta trouble when they start telling The Tale Of The Carnival Of Doom. Which is to say, it’s not long before they’re encountering all the horrific made-up monsters from their own stories—including the malevolent Mr. Tophat—in the greasepaint-streaked flesh.

The three-part limited series will air throughout October of this year, with the first installment arriving on Friday the 11th, and follow-ups coming in the subsequent weeks.