There are a few images from the television, movies and books of my childhood that I look back on with abject horror:
The flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz. Moaning Myrtle’s pale white hand falling out of a body bag in a black-and-white flashback in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (I rewatched this movie recently and it is honestly so metal). Mr. Oogie Boogie leaking bugs out of his canvas sack belly in The Nightmare Before Christmas. That scene in The Magic School Bus when the red head kid takes off his oxygen mask on a trip to Pluto and deadass dies (is it just me who remembers this?? I will not carry this trauma alone!!) And Mallika talked about the nightmare fever dream that was Courage the Cowardly Dog.
They all haunted me when I was young, but looking back at them now, I still get the heebie jeebies. And every single one of those movies and TV shows I just mentioned? They’re made for children. This isn’t adult content I stumbled upon on accident or viewed sneakily, evading my parents’ supervision. These images continue to unsettle me, in part, because they imply the existence of adults who sat in front of a computer or a typewriter and dreamt up stories that would frighten children specifically. And they succeeded. Something in all those things struck a nerve with an 8-year-old me that still vibrates in 27-year-old me. They’re formative building blocks to my anxieties, my nightmares, my sardonic sense of humor. What power those adults had! How did they know exactly what strings to pull, buttons to push? What drove them? Why was it important to frighten? Why did we children need to be scared?
These are questions I’d love to ask R. L. Stine.
Robert Lawrence Stine is the author of all ‘90s children’s nightmares. If you’re around my age, you’ve undoubtedly seen his name at the bottom of a thin Scholastic paperback copy of one of his 62 installments of Goosebumps.
The now 80-year-old brought us spooky classics such as Say Cheese and Die!, Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, Ghost Camp, Egg Monsters from Mars and Say Cheese and Die - Again!. The books interspersed comedy and horror, and despite the third-grade reading level, always pushed the boundary of what a children’s book was expected to be. They often ended like a horror movie would, unresolved and ominous.
In 1995, the books were turned into an anthology series that was syndicated in the U.S. by Fox Kids (premiering in October of all months!). Reruns of Goosebumps aired on Cartoon Network in the early aughts, where a young Rachel would do her best to avoid them. While I now see the television show’s title sequence for the certified banger that it is (seriously, this walked so the Succession theme could run), at the time it was just eerie enough to ward me off. I saw the ventriloquist dolls and the pool of earthworms and said thank you very much, but that’s not for me.
The series cycled through several other lives: an animated series, a Jack Black movie no one saw and now a Disney+/Hulu TV series starring Justin Long. I started the new series this week, hoping it would spark some inspiration for a Halloween-themed newsletter. I was, unsurprisingly, underwhelmed. The show traded the spooky jazz of the 90s theme song for Travis Scott’s 2016 “goosebumps” (a bop, but a lesser bop). There was no title sequence at all, no ghostly “G” floating past a possessed Labrador Retriever.
The show worked in some elements of Stine’s books, but the through line was a YA plot I swear I’ve seen before, centering around teens but devoid of the charms of childhood. The cinematography was shrouded in a bland blue. The acting was fine but if I’m going to care about the life of a teenage boy, I need more than some girl problems and the threat of getting benched for an important basketball game. I’m talking being frenemies with your love-child brother or returning to your hometown after hundreds of years away to see your ex’s doppleganger (I swear to God, One Tree Hill and The Vampire Diaries are not the only shows Mallika and I watch).
I made it about 30 minutes into the pilot before I started to scan my brain for memories of the Goosebumps of my youth. Like I said, I was wary of the Cartoon Network reruns. I’ve never really been someone who likes to be scared outright. I wasn’t drawn to the hooded figures who jump out of closets. I steered clear of the Animorphs and the big spiders and the haunted dolls. When my friends suggested we watch a horror movie at sleepovers I threw a fit and threatened to leave even if it was my house. Maybe I was already jaded. The way I saw it, the world had enough horrors. I did not need to manufacture more.
But still, I’ve always been drawn to a certain darkness. I sound like Cole Sprouse chain smoking on a podcast, but it’s true! My favorite movie at 10 years old was Moulin Rouge, which famously ends with Nicole Kidman dying of tuberculosis in Ewan McGregor’s arms as he sobs the way I cry when I’m on my period and I can’t find that one tank top I really wanted to wear to an outing I’m already 20 minutes late for. That final reprise of “Come What May” was my Roman Empire. And speaking of Nicole Kidman, my twisted adolescent self would rewind and rewatch on a loop that scene in Practical Magic where Jimmy Angelov sings “You’re Always on My Mind.” Something about his aftershave, his bloodshot eyes, his fingers encircling a half-empty bottle of liquor — it haunted me in an exciting way. I was interested in the hell that exists inside regular human people. I didn’t need all the worms and stuff.
That being said, while Justin Long was evicting some teen partiers out of his haunted mansion in the background, there was one Goosebumps flashback that came into clear focus.
I couldn’t remember if the memory came from the books or the tv series, though I suspected the book because the image felt intimate, like my brain had constructed it. Some trick-or-treaters were accosted by tall hooded figures with jack-o-lanterns on their heads. The kids assumed it was a costume, but the figures lifted the pumpkins up from the hoods and there was no human head underneath.
Now, the implication of a jack-o-lantern species of sorts did not frighten me. Although these guys were way less charismatic, they invoked a muted image of Jack the Pumpkin King. But what was terrifying about the creatures was how they were made. In my vivid recollection of the story, the figures were carrying fresh, hollow jack-o-lanterns, and they placed them on the heads of the trick-or-treaters, sucking the children into a void and replacing not just their heads with the jack-o-lanterns, but their consciousness with a vacant malignance. The children joined the jack-o-lanterns, never to return to themselves.
I did some googling and found the episode on YouTube, “Attack of the Jack-o-Lanterns.” Turns out my brain had plucked out the most horrifying essence of the story and erased the rest. It was scary, the community theater vibe of the child acting somehow adding an additional veil of discomfort. The story was set in a neighborhood enveloped in paranoia after four adults in a town over had gone missing a few days before Halloween. The main character has a nightmare where she’s invited into a woman’s house for candy, and led upstairs to her deformed husband’s bedroom where a hoard of children are walking around in shackles (the stranger-danger anxiety of the 90s in a nutshell). When she trick-or-treats with friends the next night, they are accosted by hooded figures with jack-o-lantern heads, who force them to collect candy from houses on a loop in perpetuity. Turning trick-or-treating into forced labor! Stine knew what the adults would find scary. But I was right in remembering that the jack-o-lanterns place a pumpkin on the heads of two of the children, scaring them into thinking they’ll be transformed into monsters.
Perhaps my brain wiped out everything that happened afterwards because the twists and turns of the true ending gave me whiplash. The jack-o-lanterns are actually bluffing, and the kids run away scared senseless. But to the other two kids left behind, the jack-o-lanterns reveal themselves to actually be the main character’s previous next door neighbors, two siblings their age. The kids, as it turns out, are actually aliens who can morph into anything. They reveal their true alien form: tiny green heads perched on top of tall bulky bodies. They were just there to play a prank. Harmless! Except not entirely harmless, because when the girl asks them if they want any candy, they tell her they already had a full course meal: four delicious humans in the neighboring town.
Oh R.L. Stine, you rascal! But it’s interesting the things that stick in your brain and the other details that get obscured. One of my core memories of childhood horror, as I mentioned before, was watching poor Arnold’s head freeze into an ice block in space in The Magic School Bus. The scene turns out to be a fake out. He doesn’t actually die. But once I saw his head all blue, the light going out of that cartoon boy’s eyes was ingrained in my skull and it wasn’t coming out. You plant a horrifying possibility in a child’s mind and it stays there.
Anyway, Stine continues to write a new generation of Goosebumps novels and also a series called Fear Street which has been adapted into a Netflix series of the same name. He acknowledged in a recent interview that the world has gotten scarier, but you still scare kids the same way. Why he is so hell bent on frightening children at all is still unclear to me. But god bless him; he talks about it with such glee.
“The world has changed a lot,” he says. “I think the world has gotten scarier but as far as writing these books for kids, I don’t think anything has changed much at all. Our fears never change and I don’t think kids have changed that much. In all these years, we’re still afraid of the dark, afraid something’s lurking under your bed, and are afraid of getting lost. Those fears never changed.”
I think about the things that scared me as a child and what they have in common. The Boogie man’s cloth skin being stripped away to reveal a cluster of bugs, the hallucinations of The Wizard of Oz, the sentient-but-barely jack-o-lanterns, the jarring displays of death in Harry Potter and Magic School Bus. They all peel back a curtain, but not to darkness. Despite what Stine said, I was never really afraid of the dark. The darkness itself almost comforted me in all its mysteries and possibilities: it was nonspecific, made up of moody vibes and vague emotions I could wear like a blanket while watching Nicole Kidman resurrect her abusive boyfriend and then kill him again. No, what truly frightened me was perhaps that there was only one possibility after all: that within the darkness contained nothingness. And the nothingness could reveal itself in an instant, the shroud stripped away by something powerful like outer space's atmosphere or, things like a jack-o-lantern being placed on your head or a deadly snake giving you the side eye, which looking back are much sillier than outer space but nonetheless. The absence of meaning, of morality — the void! That is the underlayer of everything truly scary.
And Stine’s right, our fears don’t really change.
B Plot
Question: Best series finale?
Mallika: I’m taking the easy way out because Rachel is IN CHICAGO if you can believe it and I need to put together a fun itinerary for this weekend since I procrastinated for weeks, so I am saying Succession. It seems like an obvious choice but also am I lying? No one got what they wanted (Tom will regret everything in three business days) except maybe Roman, but everyone got what they deserved. Shiv epitomized what it means to be a sister when she said “I might have changed my mind” in the boardroom meltdown scene, and Jeremy Strong’s method acting all came together for that spittle that came out of his mouth during, “I’M THE ELDEST BOY.”
Rachel: I famously hate series finales and have never watched one more than once, unless it’s the ending of a miniseries or short-lived show like Fleabag. I’m taking those ones out of the running because wrapping up a show that has gone on for muliple seasons is a much greater challenge. I’ll say Seinfeld because although I am strongly against the prison industrial complex, I think more shows should end in all of the characters being carted off to jail. Gossip Girl, for instance.
C Plot
Oh where to begin this week?
Sophia Bush is dating an athlete. Millie Bobby Brown has officially come out as a feminist because her psychic told her so. Wallace Shawn is back in Rachel’s good graces after all that Woody Allen nonsense. The kids from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide need to be STOPPED.
A24 is making a TV series about Paris Hilton’s life and Elle Fanning is producing it. If Sam Levinson touches this in any way, we will be burning things down.
And finally, happy belated birthday to Libra king Matthew McFadyen.