Are R. L. Stine’s modern Goosebumps protagonists anything other than white? Other than cis, or at least straight? Are they all still just straight white middle-class kids?
I’m not asking out of salt, I’m genuinely curious.
Several years ago, rumors about a lost Nickelodeon movie branded too disturbing for children’s television began popping up around the internet. 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. (This being a made-for-TV horror movie, naturally one of the twins was evil.)
After one twin got sick the other soon followed, with both boys eventually succumbing to the illness. 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. According to the local undertaker, anyone who ventured down Cry Baby Lane after dark could hear the evil brother crying from beyond the grave.
Cry 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. 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. Meaning those ghostly wails were actually the good twin crying out for help. But the teens realized the error too late: The evil twin had already been summoned and quickly began possessing the local townspeople.
MOVIE OR MYTH?
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 with no video evidence of it online for years, some people questioned whether Cry Baby Lane had ever really existed in the first place.
“Okay, so this story sounds completely fake, Nick would NEVER air this on TV,” one Kongregate forum poster said in September 2011. “And why would this be made knowing it’s for kids? This story just sounds too fake …”
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.
Before Cry Baby Lane was a blip in Nick’s primetime schedule, it was nearly a $100 million theatrical release. 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. 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. “There was a haunted farmhouse, and if you went up there at midnight, you could hear a baby crying and it’d make your high school girlfriend scared,” he told The Daily.
BIG SCARES ON A SMALL BUDGET:
Even with the now-meager budget, Cry Baby Lane maintained many of the same elements of a much larger picture. In a bid to generate more publicity around the project, Nickelodeon cast Oscar nominee Frank Langella as the local undertaker (a role Lauer had originally wanted Tom Waits to play). All the biggest set pieces from the screenplay were kept intact, and as a result, the crew had no money left to do any extra filming.
Only two scenes from the movie ended up getting cut—one that alluded to skinny dipping and another that depicted an old man’s head fused onto the body of a baby in a cemetery. The story of a father performing amateur surgery on the corpses of his sons, however, made it into the final film.
The truth of what happened after Cry Baby Lane premiered on October 28, 2000 has been muddied over the years. In most retellings, Nickelodeon received an “unprecedented number” of complaints about the film and responded by sealing it away in its vault and acting like the whole thing never happened. But if that version of events is true, Nick has never acknowledged it.
Even Lauer wasn’t aware of any backlash from parents concerned about the potentially scarring effects of the film until The Daily made him aware of the rumors years later. “All I know is that they aired it once,” he told the paper. “I just assumed they didn’t show it again because they didn’t like it! I did it, I thought it failed, and I moved on.”
But the idea that the movie was pulled from airwaves for being too scary for kids isn’t so far-fetched. Though Cry Baby Lane never shows the conjoined twins being sawed apart on screen, it does pair the already-unsettling story with creepy images of writhing worms, broken glass, and animal skulls. This opening sequence, combined with the spooky, empty-eyed victims of possession that appear later, and multiple scenes where a child gets swallowed by a grave, may have made the film slightly more intense than the average episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?
IMPERFECT TIMING:
Cry Baby Lane premiered at a strange time in internet history: Too early for pirated copies to immediately spring up online yet late enough for it to grow into a web-fueled folktale. The fervor surrounding the film peaked in 2011, when a viral Reddit thread about Cry Baby Lane caught the attention of one user claiming to have the so-called “lost” film recorded on VHS. He later uploaded the tape for the world to view and suddenly the lost movie was lost no longer.
News of the unearthed movie made waves across the web, and instead of staying quiet and waiting for the story to die down, Nickelodeon decided to get in on the hype. That Halloween, Nick aired Cry Baby Lane for the first time in over a decade. Regardless of whether the movie had previously been banned or merely forgotten, the network used the mystery surrounding its origins to their PR advantage.
“We tried to freak people out with it,” a Nick employee who worked at The 90s Are All That (now The Splat), the programming block that resurrected Cry Baby Lane (and who wished to remain anonymous) said of the promotional campaign for the event. “They were creepy and a little glitchy. We were like, ‘This never aired because it was too scary and we’re going to air it now.’”
Cry Baby Lane now makes regular appearances on Nickelodeon’s ‘90s block around Halloween, which likely means Nick hasn’t received enough complaints to warrant locking it back in the vault. And during less spooky times of the year, nostalgic horror fans can find the full movie on YouTube.
The mystery surrounding Cry Baby Lane’s existence may have been solved, but the urban legend of the movie that was “too scary for kids’ TV” persists—even at the network that produced it.
“People who were definitely working at Nickelodeon in 2000, but didn’t necessarily work on [Cry Baby Lane] were like, ‘Yeah I heard about it, I remember it being a thing,’“ the Nick employee says. “It’s sort of like its own legend within the company.”
Goose bumbs on my ass at the first penetration… a sure fire sign that I am going to cum like a freight train in the next couple of moments… unf… I can already feel my legs shaking… I wish that was my ass… ugh… cocks… where are you?
“From this day forth there would be but one king in Westeros. Those who bent the knee to Aegon of HouseTargaryen would keep their lands and titles. Those who took up arms against him would be thrown down, humbled, and destroyed.”
Comic Slappy the Dummy by IDW publishing was fucking amazing and I love him (I also kin him but that’s because of the theater nerd in me claiming him as one of us)
Here’s him doing the stupid donut joke from the mbmb&m, him ranting about playing cards to Billy from Dead Silence, him making Movie slappy uncomfortable, and a Christmas suit I gave him for SHITS AND GIGGLES BABY!
The Horror at Camp Jellyjam contained all of the elements I crave in a Goosebumps book. It wasn’t afraid to go big and get weird. The book opens with Wendy and her brother Evan arriving at the camp when the trailer that they’re hiding in gets unhitched from their parent’s car and they crash in the woods. Part of me was wondering if the whole book was just Wendy’s ICU fever dream because they were not wearing seatbelts. Buddy the counselor was super-creepy, and the sports-based summer camp sounded like a never-ending gym class. That would have been literal hell for me as a child, so I deeply related to Wendy’s disillusionment as the story progressed. The twist at the end was batshit crazy in the best way. Unfortunately, the book fell short of making enough sense to place it in the upper echelon of Goosebumps classics like One Day at HorrorlandandWelcome to Camp Nightmare. With a few edits to explain some of the plot holes, or perhaps a significantly longer page count, this book could have really worked. Despite its flaws, The Horror at Camp Jellyjam was fun to read and it leaned into its weirdness. It’s hard to stay mad at the messier parts when I was enjoying the ride.
Score:3.5
For my full snark-filled recap with spoilers, gifs, and memes to illustrate my very important points, check it out on my website blog Fits of Nostalgia!
I had heard The Barking Ghost was one of R.L. Stine’s least favorite Goosebumps books, and I can see why. The first act of the story showed a lot of potential and was setting things up nicely. So much so that I was beginning to think that the book’s reputation was misplaced. I was wrong. There was a fun concept hidden, but it was buried beneath a half-baked plot that descended into sheer stupidity by the end. I understand that some kids do find dogs scary. I think those kids were the target audience of this particular book. I was never one of those kids. In fact, I think I wanted to be a dog when I was in third grade. So this whole concept wasn’t exactly scary for me at any age. In many ways, The Barking Ghost was a culmination of some of Stine’s worst tendencies in this series. Too much time was spent on fake scares and not enough time was given to developing the villains or their predicament. This is one of the few instances where the TV adaptation made significant improvements to the book. Which is to say the book really could have been good with a few significant edits. It’s a shame when a good idea suffers in order to meet a deadline. Everything in The Barking Ghost, Stine has done before and he’s done it better.
Score:1.5
For my full snark-filled recap with spoilers, gifs, and memes to illustrate my very important points, check it out on my website blog Fits of Nostalgia!
Night of the Living Dummy II is a huge improvement on the original book, which is fondly remembered by many as being better than it actually is. This isn’t quite the Terminator 2 or Empire Strikes Back level of the sequel being better than the original, but kudos to Stine for pulling off the rare fete. Unlike its predecessor, Night of the Living Dummy II does not waste a full two-thirds of the book on exhausting fake scares, and it doesn’t star the same insufferable and bratty twin protagonists. In fact, the only returning character from the first book is Slappy. I liked Amy as the middle child protagonist; I don’t think I’ve seen that before in a Goosebumps book. I also thought the book did a really good job building tension and escalating the stakes up until the third act. Unfortunately, like the first book, there isn’t a lot of logic behind the living dummy or his motives. He exists to play mean pranks and has a weird obsession with making children his slaves with no obvious means of enforcing said enslavement. It was another missed opportunity to do something way scarier. I wasn’t sold on the twist in the third act, it felt too contrived for the sake of creating a twist. Overall, Night of the Living Dummy II was a mostly fun read and a vast improvement over the first book, even as it shared some of the same flaws.
Score: 3
For my full snark-filled recap with spoilers, gifs, and memes to illustrate my very important points, check it out on my website blog Fits of Nostalgia!
It Came From Beneath the Sink has a great title, a solid concept, and a unique monster. Unfortunately, it never managed to raise the stakes high enough for any of that to really matter. The characters are fine, the plot is technically fine, and it doesn’t rely on faulty villain logic to explain itself. Kudos to Stine for another great dog name; the cocker spaniel named Killer was a great touch. The book’s biggest crime is that it was boring. Stine had the opportunity here to get real weird and he didn’t take it. The Grool was gross and creepy, but it could have been way more powerful and menacing. I honestly think this concept had the potential to reach One Day at Horrorland orWelcome to Camp Nightmare levels of weird and fun, but it just kinda got stuck in the first act. It needed to do more than bring bad luck, or the bad luck needed to be way worse than it was. It Came From Beneath the Sink had all of the elements needed to make a greatGoosebumps book, but it ultimately fell short.
Score: 3
For my full snark-filled recap with spoilers, gifs, and memes to illustrate my very important points, check it out on my website blog Fits of Nostalgia!
Monster Blood III is the sort of sequel you get when you start with a shoddy concept and then stretch it beyond any reasonable length. The Monster Blood books boast more sequels than any other in the original Goosebumps run, and it’s slightly baffling when you realize how none of them is particularly good. My theory is that the badass-sounding title and beautiful Tim Jacobus cover art of the first Monster Blood drove the book to best-seller status in spite of its weirdly bad plot. This brings us to this book. It was tedious. Andy and Evan, the one strong point of the first book, are stuck in a painfully stupid cycle in which they keep using Monster Blood in spite of its dire consequences. They have horrible ideas, and it’s hard to feel anything for them when things go awry. This time we add Kermit to the mix, who is a new kind of awful. There is nothing scary about green slime that keeps growing. It’s not even as gross as it could be. Also being a giant sounds fun, but that only happens for a relatively short section of the book. Most of it is Kermit being terrible to Evan and Andy. The ending could have been satisfying, but Stine has done similar twists and done them better. I also just didn’t care. Three books into a mini-franchise titled Monster Blood and we still have never seen a single monster from whom the blood supposedly originates. That, I believe, is the most unforgivable thing of all.
Score: 1
Check out my website blog my full review with memes, spoilers, and snark:
