Buzz
Years ago, whispers began spreading online about a mysterious Nickelodeon film considered too unsettling for kids' TV. The story revolved around a father who, ashamed of his conjoined twins, concealed them during their upbringing. In true made-for-TV horror fashion, one twin was inherently wicked.
When one twin fell ill, the other followed, leading to their untimely deaths. To hide his secret, the father used a rusty saw to separate their bodies, burying the good twin in the local cemetery and the evil one at the end of a remote dirt road named Cry Baby Lane—also the film's rumored title. Locals claimed that anyone daring to walk down Cry Baby Lane at night would hear the evil twin's mournful cries from the grave.
The story shifts to the year 2000, where a group of teenagers sneaks into the cemetery to communicate with the spirit of the good twin. During a seance, they discover the father's grave error: he had buried the good twin on Cry Baby Lane and the evil one in the cemetery. The cries were actually the good twin pleading for help. Unfortunately, the teens realized this too late, as the evil twin had already been unleashed, possessing the townspeople one by one.
MOVIE OR MYTH?
Parents were reportedly horrified that such grim material aired on a channel known for family-friendly content. After its single broadcast on the Saturday before Halloween in 2000, Nickelodeon allegedly erased all traces of the film. With no footage available online for years, many doubted whether Cry Baby Lane had ever truly existed.
“This story sounds entirely fabricated. Nickelodeon would NEVER show something like this,” a user on the Kongregate forum commented in September 2011. “Why would they create something so dark for kids? It just seems too unbelievable…”
Although the tales surrounding the film may not be entirely accurate, Nickelodeon confirmed that the “lost” Halloween movie was indeed real and contained all the bizarre elements that fueled its legendary status.
Before Cry Baby Lane briefly appeared in Nickelodeon’s lineup, it was almost a $100 million theatrical project. Peter Lauer, known for directing episodes of The Secret World of Alex Mack and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, co-wrote the script with KaBlam! co-creator Robert Mittenthal. The film, which later inspired its own urban legends, was based on a ghost story Lauer heard as a child in Ohio. “There was a haunted farmhouse where, if you visited at midnight, you could hear a baby crying, scaring your high school girlfriend,” he shared with The Daily.
BIG SCARES ON A SMALL BUDGET
While Nickelodeon had good intentions, Paramount, its parent company, wasn’t enthusiastic about adapting the screenplay into a feature film. The script was shelved for nearly a year until Nickelodeon approached Lauer about producing Cry Baby Lane as a low-budget TV movie with an $800,000 budget. Lauer eagerly agreed to the project.
Despite the limited budget, Cry Baby Lane retained many elements of a high-budget production. To boost publicity, Nickelodeon cast Oscar-nominated actor Frank Langella as the town undertaker—a role originally envisioned for Tom Waits. The film preserved all major set pieces from the script, leaving no room for additional filming due to budget constraints.
Only two scenes were ultimately removed: one hinting at skinny dipping and another showing an old man’s head attached to a baby’s body in a cemetery. However, the disturbing scene of a father performing crude surgery on his sons’ corpses remained in the final cut.
The aftermath of Cry Baby Lane’s premiere on October 28, 2000, remains unclear. Many accounts claim Nickelodeon received an "unprecedented number" of complaints, leading the network to lock the film away and pretend it never existed. However, Nickelodeon has never officially confirmed this version of events.
Lauer himself was unaware of any parental backlash regarding the film’s potentially disturbing content until The Daily informed him of the rumors years later. “All I know is that it aired once,” he said. “I assumed they didn’t re-air it because they weren’t satisfied with it. I did my part, thought it didn’t succeed, and moved on.”
The notion that the movie was pulled for being too frightening for children isn’t entirely implausible. While Cry Baby Lane doesn’t explicitly show the conjoined twins being separated, it combines its unsettling narrative with eerie visuals like squirming worms, shattered glass, and animal skulls. The opening sequence, along with scenes of hollow-eyed possessed individuals and children being consumed by graves, likely made the film more intense than a typical episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?
IMPERFECT TIMING
Cry Baby Lane debuted during an odd period in internet history—too early for pirated copies to flood the web but late enough to become a web-fueled folktale. The film’s mystique reached its peak in 2011 when a viral Reddit thread about it caught the attention of a user who claimed to have a VHS recording of the “lost” movie. After uploading the tape, the film was no longer a mystery.
The rediscovery of the movie created a buzz online, and rather than staying silent, Nickelodeon capitalized on the hype. That Halloween, Nick aired Cry Baby Lane for the first time in over ten years. Whether the film had been banned or simply forgotten, the network leveraged its enigmatic history for PR purposes.
“We aimed to unsettle viewers with it,” said an anonymous Nickelodeon employee from The 90s Are All That (now The Splat), the programming block that revived Cry Baby Lane. “The promos were eerie and slightly distorted. We played up the angle that it was banned for being too terrifying and were bringing it back for a special airing.”
Cry Baby Lane now regularly features in Nickelodeon’s '90s block during Halloween, suggesting the network hasn’t received enough complaints to shelve it again. For those feeling nostalgic, the full movie is also available on YouTube year-round.
While the mystery of Cry Baby Lane’s existence has been resolved, the legend of the film deemed “too scary for kids’ TV” continues to thrive—even among those at the network that created it.
“Even employees who were at Nickelodeon in 2000 but didn’t work on Cry Baby Lane recall hearing about it,” the anonymous employee shared. “It’s become its own internal legend within the company.”
