Bumping Geese 2: Stay Out Of The Basement

When I was young, I happened to see the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors. I'd seen the 1986 film adaptation of the stage musical, and I was a fan, so seeing the original film was an exciting novelty.

The 1960 film and the 1986 film have very different endings. Spoilers. In the 1986 film, Seymour electrocutes the plant and it dies and then Seymour and Audrey live happily ever after.

In the 1960 version, the plant just fucking eats him. And then the monster plant's flowers open for an expectant and excited crowd, and the flowers have the faces of all the people the plant has eaten.

Little Nope Of Horrors

That shit fucked me up. To this day just the thought of it gives me chills. Looking up that image on Google, it occurs to me that my mind has probably made the whole thing a lot more horrific and convincing than 1960 film effects actually allowed, but, you know, I'm happy not to go back and double check.

Anyway.

Goosebumps book #2, 'Stay Out Of The Basement' is some creepy shit about about monster plants.

Nothing good has ever happened in a basement

Oh, and this one is also weirdly damp. A lot more wetness going on. Anyway.

'Stay Out Of The Basement' concerns the Brewer family - mother, father, son Casey and daughter Margaret - and the strange goings-on in their basement. The Brewer family live in California, and the father, a doctor of botany, has just lost his job as a researcher at California Polytechnic. Rather than get another job, he decides to hide himself away in the basement for hours on end, conducting botanical experiments on his own, continuing the very work that got him fired from the university.

This obviously puts a strain on his relationship the children and Mrs Brewer. Then Mrs Brewer's sister in Arizona is hospitalised, and Mrs Brewer must go to assist her sister, leaving Casey and Margret in the precarious care of their now estranged Father.

Margaret immediately notices strange new developments in her father's worsening state. Not only is he cold and distant, but he stops eating with his family, a wound on his arm never seems to heal in the weeks they are alone with him, and eventually they even discover his hair has fallen out and he is growing leaves from his scalp. At one point a visitor comes to see Dr Brewer's work and seems to vanish completely, never leaving the basement.

Several times, Casey and Margaret sneak into the basement to look at what their father is up to, and see their basement has been almost completely transformed into a rainforest of bizarre new plants. They find evidence of the missing guest and hear strange, human-sounding noises coming from a locked supply closet. Attempts to get their father to open up are met with vague half-truths about his attempts to splice plant and animal DNA to create a new kind of life form that is both animal and vegetable.

Pokemon. Dr Brewer is just breeding Pokemon.

In the book's finale, Margaret's worst fears are realised when they break into the supply closet and find their father tied up and gagged, apparently locked away by a plant monster that has replaced him. Or perhaps this Dr Brewer in the supply closet is the plant monster copy, locked away for being a dangerous abomination? In the end it is up to poor Margaret to decide which is their real father and which one gets the axe. Literally.

And it seems she chooses right, when the closet-father speaks warmly to her in a way the plant monster never did. Most of the remaining plants are destroyed, and the ones that are less creepy are moved to the garden. The family is reunited, safe again, and it looks as though Dr Brewer may even get his job back. Apparently California Polytech has changed its position on funding mad scientists playing God. Makes sense.

But then, in the final moments, Margaret is outside amongst the strange new plants when she notices one of them seems to be trying to get her attention. And that little flower appears to have the face, and voice, of her father!

What a twist!

And also.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK RL STINE

I've heard that Walt Disney once said children are resilient enough to handle anything so long as there is a happy ending.

Apparently Mr Goosebumps has a different philosophy, which is

FUCK THE KIDS, HERE'S SOME TRAUMA

Okay. Look. Plant monsters creep me out. This book reads like it was written specifically to scare me. Like the first book, the horror is well delivered. The tension is real, the scares are effective. I didn't notice any major inconsistencies in the narrative like in 'Welcome To Dead House' and there were fewer jump scares.

Jump scares, by the way, don't work well in books. In films they're over used and obnoxious, but they can at least get the heart racing. In books, they always - ALWAYS - fall flat.

So in every way this book is an improvement on the last. Better written, creepier, an even more imaginative set up with even more frightening monsters. Dialogue is still a bit awkward. But, look, this review is coming out on a Monday because I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed book #1 that I could hardly wait to get to book #2. That's praise enough on its own, right?

But 'Stay Out Of The Basement' also made it clear why these books were a success and why, decades later, I can read them as an adult and still get pulled into them, still have them tug on all the right emotions, can overlook that I outgrew this reading level a long time ago.

The best horror serves as an exploration of humanity's common and real anxieties. I've said this before right here in on this blog. A haunted house is never just a haunted house. A slasher is never just a slasher. A zombie is never just a zombie. Beneath the surface of great horror is something all of us feel in our daily lives. 'Stay Out of The Basement' is about creepy plant monsters, but it's also about a father who loses his job and retreats from his family into an unhealthy obsession to try and regain his pride. It's about a husband and wife who become estranged from each other and in doing so, from their children. It's about grown up problems shaking the foundations of grown up lives, and it's told from the view of children who don't quite get it, who see the problem, but the adults won't talk to them about it. Their parents try to protect them by keeping them at a distance, but in doing so only expose them to new danger.*

The Brewer family is in crisis, and that manifests as a plant monster that replaces their loving father and fills their house with a dark, primal, prehistoric dread...

And then it has a creepy as fuck ending because, again: fuck the kids, here's some trauma.

*No Marxism this week. One analysis is enough.