My time spooking viewers in a Nineties Nickelodeon show

Picture the scene: it’s 1994, and you’re 11 or 12 years old.

- ROSS HULL

It’s a little past your bedtime. But Mom is letting you stay up late because your favourite TV show is on.

The opening credits roll – spooky music over images of a haunted swing set and a sinister-looking puppet – and you see a dark woodland clearing full of kids about your age. One of them – the tall guy with glasses – takes a strange power out of a burlap bag, and tosses it into the fire, which flares up impressively. “Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this story…”

The show was Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and I was the guy with the glasses: Ross Hull, known to audiences around the world as Gary (no last name). The series was a horror anthology made for kids, wherein each episode the Midnight Society – a diverse collective of high school-aged kids – would gather in the woods to tell a scary story, which would make up the bulk of the episode. Because I was part of that framing device, I was in virtually every episode of the original run of the show – sort of like a well-moisturised Crypt Keeper.

I started out in modelling, TV, and theatre at quite a young age. My first gigs were unique compared to the “normal” stuff my friends in school were doing at the time: I was a model for Zellers, a Canadian discount department store, and my first commercial was for Duncan Hines cookies. There wasn’t a huge amount going on in Canada in the early nineties, but US shows would sometimes come out here – I fit the bill for one of them, and thought I’d give it a shot.