Are You Afraid of the Dark? (TV Series) The Tale of the Mystical Mirror (1995) User Reviews

"You can be young for all eternity, isn't that wonderful?"

[Foreverisacastironmess123 · 8/10 · 28 December 2016]

I enjoy this tale a lot that's about an evil old witch masquerading herself as a beautiful woman who runs a beauty boutique that she has owned for a very long time by stealing the youth of the unwitting young girls that work for her, whom she weirdly refers to as "beauties." With the help of her magic hypnotising mirror she performs a strange ritual where she transforms three girls into dogs which are then sacrificed to preserve her own beauty and unnatural life. And I don't say "dogs" as in those who could be considered ugly, I mean that she full-blown performs an Animorphs on their asses and changes the bitches into four-legged shaggy bitches, which may be ironic or poetic!! Can the precocious young plain Jane who's the latest to fall into her clutches summon enough willpower to break through her illusion and foil the beast in beauty's disguise latest ritual as well as learn a valuable lesson in inner beauty along the way? So I really could not believe that Andrea Lui who played the bitchy coworker at the boutique was only twelve at the time of filming, I would have put her as at least seventeen! I liked the performance of Jayne Heitmeyer as the villainous blonde harpy Ms. Valenti. She's so vain and well-spoken and vaguely sinister, everything she says to the girls has positively huge undertones of "I'm going to steal your soul to keep my youth!" And she cuts such a striking and hilariously on-the-nose figure in her floor length dark gown with concealing hood and black velvet murder gloves, it's seriously just like if Evil-Lyn took up a job as a hair dresser! And she was quite beautiful and alluring in her manner. You could totally buy her as somebody who lured ugly ducklings to their doom with the promise of beauty! There's a touch of the Dorian Gray thing to the story, I liked the touch of how a regular mirror would reflect the nasty truth of all of Ms. Valenti's many self portraits and photographs, that she was really a hideous old woman. And it was a very nicely done special effect when her mirror is shattered and she does an Indiana Jones and withers into an old lady, then a skeleton, then explodes into dust, it is pretty gruesome! So like most in the series it's a simple story but I love it, beauty is the focus of the episode and for what it is they explore the theme well and it has a nice moral, and it goes out on a snappy thoughtful line! Well-made fun tale.

Uglyness Reflected

[hellraiser7 · 7/10 · 23 August 2019]

This one isn't really a favorite of mine but it's a good one to watch.

What I like about the episode is that it's sort of a modern Brothers Grimm tale, it really has that feel from the forest, the witch, and the witch's pursuit to steeling youth to stay young and immortal. Though also the tale has a bit of Greek Mythology as the witch is a modern spin on the Siren, where in some stories they use beauty to not just guise their true appearance but mask their real motives. Let alone the name of the shop Elysian which is the name of one of the realms in the Greek Myth which is a place of beauty.

I really liked seeing Laura Bertrum again in "Are You Afraid of the Dark" despite the fact she doesn't play the lead this time as she plays best friend Laurel, she really looks lovely which made her a perfect fit for this episode. The other girl Cindy that is the lead I thought was decent, she was pretty, a protagonist on the shy side; but she's a person that seemed to be sharp and can hold her own against danger.

One part I really like is when Cindy she goes upstairs and we see different photos of the witch and in each of the photos we see her as the winner of beauty contests from times long gone. This scene really tells you how old this witch is and how narcistic she truly is, the whole house is a shrine dedicated to the witch. This just increases the creep factor as you already know their both in imminent danger. The suspense is hoping Cindy will unveil the truth, before it's too late.

Of course the episode does have a good message on how true beauty is really from the inside not from the outside. The witch she placed so much value to surface beauty, which she has plenty of but underneath it all there was nothing underneath the surface.

Cindy isn't the kind of girl that won't make it on a "Cover Girl" commercial anytime soon, but that didn't matter because she's a person that isn't concerned about looks as her mind was really on what really mattered which is her best friend Laurel whom was in danger. Which is what truly made Cindy beautiful because she thinks about what really matters the most in life, which is part of what makes true beauty last forever.

Looks can be deceiving because you never really see the ugliness.

Rating: 3 stars