Editorials
[Editorial] The Next R.L. Stine Adaptation Should Be A Choice-Based-Narrative Video Game
Growing up as the youngest of four, I inherited a ton of hand-me-downs from my older siblings, including a spooky gene that really embraced horror movies and Halloween. Consequently, it’s no surprise that I gravitated to the creepy, shimmering R. L. Stine paperbacks that would occasionally pop-up on the shelves in my room. I’d stay up on school nights way later than the average 4th grader should have, using the light from my Nintendo DS to illuminate the pages of THE HAUNTED MASK or WELCOME TO DEAD HOUSE, and then continue my quest to find more of Stine’s works in the school library the next day. It was through this endeavor that I found the ultimate combination of my love of video games, horror, and books: The GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS series.
My current love of choice-based narrative horror games is no surprise when I look back on how much I obsessed over the GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS books, which are non-linear, interactive, and personalized experiences with multiple endings—a very similar paradigm to common video games. If you found one of my childhood copies of ESCAPE FROM THE CARNIVAL OF HORRORS or SCREAM OF THE EVIL GENIE, you’d notice that almost half of the pages within the books are bent in the corners or have markings in some way as I tried to navigate each of the choices within them to find the best endings. Years later, I devour games like Until Dawn or Telltale’s The Walking Dead in the same way. With the current fixation on the works of R.L. Stine with the FEAR STREET trilogy and the upcoming Just Beyond series on Disney+, it has me thinking: Wouldn’t it be amazing to have some choice-based narrative horror games based on the CHOOSE YOUR OWN SCARES series?
There are 50 books in the series, spanning an impressive array of settings, cryptids and creatures. You may find yourself at a camp pitted against a cult of zombies and alien creatures in the same book, and each book boasts 20+ endings. Some storylines have you primarily focused on escaping dangerous situations, while others task you with fighting back against the monsters trying to eat you. A video game adaptation of any book in the series would have a robust source of material to work with.
I re-read a couple of the GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS books before writing this article to see how they’ve held up, and make sure that it wasn’t my nostalgia lenses convincing me that this was a good idea. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t—in fact, it only further piqued my interest because I forgot just how freaking dark the books get at times. A bad ending in ESCAPE CAMP RUN-FOR-YOUR-LIFE had my body slowly deteriorate, in detail, after being attacked by a skeleton, with my “skin crumbling and peeling off” as my organs, “shriveled and fell out.” Another ending in RETURN TO THE CARNIVAL OF HORRORS had me and my group fall prey to acidic slugs whose slime felt like “landing in a red-hot frying pan” as they slithered onto all of us, melting our skin off as our cries echoed into the void. GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS has the versatility of appealing to juvenile audiences while also having material that could still appeal to the horror fans who grew up with Stine.
The open-endedness of the characters and the ability for any reader to project themselves as the protagonist in each book would also make it much easier to modernize each story. When discussing the process of adapting the FEAR STREET series into a film trilogy, director Leigh Janiak mentioned to Rue Morgue, “We were given free rein. We were very much supported by the producers, by the studio, by the R.L. Stine estate, to look at the material and decide what made sense.” FEAR STREET tackled themes of generational trauma and homophobia while remaining true to the spirit of the book series, indicating that a video-game adaptation would likely be granted the same ability to explore stories and themes relevant to current audiences.
With the advancements in VR and experimentations in blurring the lines between video games and film, there are countless innovative ways that adaptations could be created, and audiences are hungry for them. A CHOOSE YOUR OWN SCARES adaptation could take on an entire anthology series, similar to The Dark Pictures Anthology, or even take the route that Black Mirror: Bandersnatch did and lean heavily in on being a cinematic experience with a branching narrative.
In any case, the resurging interest in adapting the works of R.L. Stine is an exciting phenomenon for new and veteran fans alike. Perhaps the reception to upcoming projects in development will dictate whether we see a deeper exploration if his works in unique ways, but the signs seem to be pointing towards the fact that exploring the CHOOSE YOUR OWN SCARES series would be a natural next step. I know I’d personally love to re-explore the Carnival Of Horrors on a big screen with a controller in hand—in the meantime, I might try to dig up more of my favorite books from the series and try my luck at getting a good ending again.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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