Scare Dare

You're not afraid, are you?

A childhood dare where a group of children explores a location after dark. It will typically involve entering an abandoned house, supposedly haunted, staying in the school for the night, exploring the surroundings of a camp after nightfall, or similar.

Of course, there will always be something else there, too. It might be their friends trying to make the test more exciting, or a harmless resident with the Face of a Thug, but it is also a great opportunity to have fun with Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. If this happens in a horror setting, you're probably better off staying home. It may also prove to be the Call Receival Area or the Forbidden Zone.

See also Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb, where the characters tend to be slightly older and the danger is considerably more.

Compare Kimodameshi, a similar Japanese tradition.

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Anime and Manga

• Twentieth Century Boys: school after dark. It was just their classmates. Oh, and a boy they thought was dead and whom Donkey mistook for a ghost.
• Ouran High School Host Club: school after dark. - It's the guys from the black magic club.
• Flunk Punk Rumble: school during the holidays. it's the guys from the supernatural research club. And the head teacher's mother, visiting.
• The manga Kimi ni Todoke: a walk after darkness on a school trip. The main character, nicknamed "Sadako" because of her resemblance to the ghost girl from The Ring movies, is asked to take part (as part of the "test") and is accepted by her classmates as a result.
  • Actually, this incident was a Kimodameshi,and she only got the respect of Chizu and Yano
• Hell Teacher Nube is rife with this. School after dark, haunted house, derelict playground, ancient graveyard, you name it. The scary urban "legend" always turns out to be true, if not worse than the legend. Dammit, Miki!
• Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni: Old School building, women's toilet. It was Marie, weeping and letting her anger known. This later becomes a TRUE Scare Dare when she officially becomes Mesomeso.

Film

• Big Fish used an abandoned house. It's a witch. For real. She is also the unlucky Love Interest, living backward in time.
• In The Village, the test is to stand with your back to the haunted woods; first one to give up loses.

Tabletop Games

• A Dark Champions scenario published by Gold Rush Games started off with a Scare Dare — a young boy is missing after having been dared to walk up to the abandoned Radley Manor after dark and place his hand on the wall. (The coal chute broke under his weight. The kids who dared him believe that the ghost of Radley Manor "got" the boy, and are too afraid of being blamed to tell anyone what happened. The biker gang using the Manor's basement as a meth lab killed the boy.)

Western Animation

• The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy uses the abandoned house. It's just some old lady living alone. Well, OK, she is also a ghost.
• A Halloween Episode of Disneys Recess has this as a segment of the episode. Vince is dared to spend the night in a hole dug by the diggers that they had been seen running screaming out of. The rest of the gang shows up during the night and the hole leads to an abandoned crypt haunted by the zombified ancestors of Miss Finster. At the end of the episode, its implied that it might have been a dream. Or maybe not...
• Happens in one of the Halloween episodes of Kick Buttowski when Kendall dares Kick and Gunther to trick or treat the Van der Death mansion up on the hill (with convenient lightning) because Kick thinks her Halloween "party" is lame (justified in that all it was, was Kendall reading a report: "The Origins of Halloween. A Report by Kendall Perkins"). Turns out the old lady who lives there loves Halloween so much that she sets up it as a haunted house every year, effectively scaring off every kid in town... which was the opposite of what she wanted.