Trivia / The Haunting Hour

aka: The Haunting Hour The Series

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• Actor Allusion: The episode "Pool Shark" had Boo Boo Stewart playing a teenage boy who inherited a shape shifting gene.
• Acting for Two: Tom Kenny not only plays Uncle Howee on the episode of the same name, but is also the voice of the rabbit puppet, Loomis.
• All-Star Cast: The series is pretty much a who's who of child and teen actors that were popular or at least well-known in the first half of the 2010's, as well as a few cases of Retroactive Recognition.
• Creator's Oddball: "How to Bargain with a Dragon" is set in a Dung Ages fantasy world, being a sequel to "The Most Evil Sorcerer" from Nightmare Hour, contrasted with Stine's usual modern horror stories, including the other short stories in this collection.
• Creator Cameo: Showruners Billy Brown and Dan Angel both have cameos in Grampires.
• Executive Meddling: Scarecrow was supposed to just have the one ending, where Bobby becomes a scarecrow. The network thought it was too dark and had them make the alternate ending. Both endings were aired and viewers were asked to vote on which one was better, most likely as a compromise.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Zigzagged. Season 1 is available on DVD, but only the first few episodes of Season 2 were put on DVD. As for the rest, you'll have to settle for torrent downloading for most of them and video website viewing for the rest, as those episodes haven't been released on DVD yet and Discovery Family doesn't rerun the show anymore.
  • The entire series is available on Tubi, but only in Spanish.
• Only So Many Canadian Actors: A good number of modern Canadian actors have played at least one role in this show.
• Playing Against Type: Happens to a lot of the actors who are on the show, sometimes even in comparison to characters they played in other episodes. Specifically:
  • Debby Ryan as Steffani in Wrong Number, who's a complete Alpha Bitch in comparison to Nice Girl Bailey from The Suite Life on Deck.
  • Calum Worthy as Game Over's Kell-Raiser, who's nowhere near The Ditz / Genius Ditz like Dez is in Austin & Ally.
  • Willow Shields as Eve in Intruders, whose Bratty Teenage Daughter contrasts Prim's Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold.
  • Tom Kenny as Uncle Howie, which is not only one of the rare times Kenny has done live action (the other times were on the sketch shows The Edge and Mr. Show), but also shows Kenny playing a cartoonish and goofy character in yellow as a villain rather than as a protagonist (like on SpongeBob SquarePants) or as comic relief (as seen with Heffer Wolfe on Rocko's Modern Life).
• Production Posse: Showrunners Dan Angel and Billy Brown, who had previously helmed Goosebumps (1995) and Night Visions brought over some writers from those shows, along with others they worked on to work on this show as well, such as Rick Drew, and Erik Patterson & Jessica Scott. Additionally, James Head and Neil Fearnly previously directed episodes of The Fearing Mind prior to this.
• Recycled Script:
  • The season four episode "Mrs. Worthington" is pretty much a Darker and Edgier take on the season three episode "Uncle Howee", only Cynthia doesn't realize (or care) that Uncle Howee's powers can harm Jared (in fact, the episode makes it clear that Cynthia cares more about Uncle Howee than her own brother), while in "Mrs. Worthington," Nate does realize that Mrs. Worthington's black magic and sadistic punishments (which he actually drew himself) may be going too far, especially when Mrs. Worthington decides to go after Nate's mom for not disciplining Molly.
  • "Intruders" has many similarities to R.L. Stine's short story "Make Me a Witch", which was also about a girl who was overshadowed by her baby brother, but with witches instead of fairies. Also, unlike Intruders, the girl in the short story actually hands her brother over.
  • "Night of the Mummy" is basically just the Goosebumps book/episode A Night in Terror Tower but with mummies.
  • My Imaginary Friend has basically the same payoff as the Goosebumps short story Good Friends. In both, the protagonist deals with a real friend and imaginary friend, and in both cases it turns out the "friend" is imaginary too.
  • Once we enter the mirror world in "Scary Mary," a lot of viewers were reminded of "The Tale of Many Faces" from Are You Afraid of the Dark? In fairness, some versions of the "Bloody Mary" myth have her as a Wicked Witch who killed girls for their blood to maintain her own youthful beauty, meaning Scary Mary's girls were lucky to just end up slaves...
• Screwed by the Network: In spades. Despite being a very popular show, having amazing ratings, and even plans for a fifth season (or sixth, if you believe part two of season three is a separate season), The Hub changing over to Discovery Family pretty much killed this show's chance of ever continuing. After the Christmas Episode "Goodwill Toward Men," the series was taken off the schedule and R.L. Stine himself said on his Twitter that the show was canceled and no new episodes were going to be made.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The writer for "Uncle Howee" explains in a review for said episode that there was a tight budget and time constraints which explains why the episode was taken indoors.
• What Could Have Been: According to an interview with Stine, The "Don't Think About It" movie was supposed to be the start of a franchise that would adapt the stories from his Haunting Hour collection, but the writers came up with an original idea for them to do first, and the other movies never got made.
  • Ken Friss' original draft of Scarecrow was much more straight forward and would have simply ended with the characters discovering that everyone in town is gone.. Billy Brown and Dan Angel fleshed it out and added all the deeper existential themes.
  • Pumpkinhead was originally supposed to end with all the kids dying at the hands of the Pumpkinheads but the network asked them to tone it down.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: In-Universe example with Brush With Madness: Alan Miller became a Reclusive Artist after being stalked by a homicidal fan eight years prior to the episode's story and snapped at Corey because he foolishly said "I follow you on Twitter" (though why a reclusive artist would be on a social media site like Twitter is a mystery).
• You Look Familiar: The show reused actors from season to season, so this was a given.