Cry Baby Lane, which would eventually spawn urban legends of its own, was inspired by a local ghost story Lauer heard growing up in Ohio. Peter Lauer, who had previously directed episodes of the Nick shows The Secret World of Alex Mack and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, co-wrote the screenplay with KaBlam! co-creator Robert Mittenthal. While the folklore surrounding the film may not be 100 percent factual, Nickelodeon quickly confirmed that the “lost” Halloween movie was very real, and that it did indeed contain all the rumored twisted elements that have made it into a legend.īefore Cry Baby Lane was a blip in Nick’s primetime schedule, it was nearly a $100 million theatrical release. “And why would this be made knowing it’s for kids? This story just sounds too fake …” “Okay, so this story sounds completely fake, Nick would NEVER air this on TV,” one Kongregate forum poster said in September 2011. But with no video evidence of it online for years, some people questioned whether Cry Baby Lane had ever really existed in the first place.
Parents were appalled that such dark content ever made it onto the family-friendly network, or so the story goes, and after airing the film once the Saturday before Halloween in 2000, Nickelodeon promptly scrubbed it from existence. But the teens realized the error too late: The evil twin had already been summoned and quickly began possessing the local townspeople. Meaning those ghostly wails were actually the good twin crying out for help. After holding a seance, they learn that the boys' father had made a mistake and mixed up the bodies of his children-burying the good son at the end of Cry Baby Lane and the evil one in the cemetery. According to the local undertaker, anyone who ventured down Cry Baby Lane after dark could hear the evil brother crying from beyond the grave.Ĭry Baby Lane then jumps to present day (well, present day in 2000), where a group of teens sneaks into the local graveyard in an effort to contact the spirit of the good twin. To keep the town from discovering his secret, the father separated their bodies with a rusty saw and buried the good one at the local cemetery and the evil one at the end of a desolate dirt road called Cry Baby Lane, which also happened to be the title of the rumored film. (This being a made-for-TV horror movie, naturally one of the twins was evil.)Īfter one twin got sick the other soon followed, with both boys eventually succumbing to the illness. They all referenced the same plot: A father of conjoined twins was so ashamed of his sons that he hid them away throughout their childhood. Several years ago, rumors about a lost Nickelodeon movie branded too disturbing for children’s television began popping up around the internet.