So far I've been reading the Classic Goosebumps reprints line. These were published in the late 2000s and each of the books I've read so far include a brief Q&A with RL Stine in which he talks about the book, himself, and promotes a (at the time) upcoming line called horror land.
This gives me an additional insight into the series beyond just reading them.
So I'm rapidly becoming an expert on all things Goosebumps, a thing I have only the mildest of interest in. It's sort of weird to find myself so dedicated to something I feel absolutely no passion for.
Still. It could be worse. I could still be reading Monster Blood.
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| This is not the cover art for the version I read. This is the cover art I remember seeing in the library as a child. |
Fortunately, 'Say Cheese and Die!' is not Monster Blood. Not only does it not feature any monster blood, it's a pretty good book. I really liked this one. It's not 'Stay Out of The Basement' good, but it's good.
'Say Cheese and Die!' is about Greg Banks, your ordinary 90s kid living an ordinary 90s life. One ordinary 90s day, he and his friends Shari, Michael, and Bird decide to indulge in some ordinary 90s entertainment by breaking into the neighbourhood abandoned/haunted house. But it turns out the house is not so abandoned or haunted, after all. It has become the squat of the local creepy vagabond known only as Spidey.
While Greg and his friends are picking through Spidey's garbage and possibly the antique belongings of whoever owned the house before Spidey moved in, Greg finds a hidden compartment with a polaroid camera. Greg, who enjoys both photography and apparently theft, takes the camera to play with and snaps a photo of his friend Michael, posed on the basement stairs. No sooner than he has taken the photo, the wooden beam Michael is leaning on snaps and he falls and injures himself. As this happens, Spidey returns to the house, and the friends must flee before they are discovered raiding the creep's home.
They escape safely - or so it would seem. But Greg is sure he sees Spidey watching them from the house. But that's not the only frightening discovery. The photo Greg took of Michael, now developed, shows Michael falling from the stairs, but Greg is confident he took the photo before the fall.
The friends shrug it off and go their separate ways, Greg keeping the stolen camera with him. When he gets home, he tests the camera again, this time taking a photo of his family's new car. Once again the photo develops wrong. The car in the photo is a wreck. Greg tries to shrug it off as some kind of defect in the camera, but the thought that this camera can take photos of the future, or perhaps causes a terrible future to occur, nags at his mind and frightens him.
Over the course of the next few days, Greg takes photos of his brother and his friends, even himself, driven by a morbid desire to prove the camera is not merely broken, but holds some kind of power. Each time he takes a photo, it shows his subject in terrible danger, or suffering a horrific injury. These frightful images even haunt his dreams. And sure enough, one by one, the terrible predictions of the photos come true. There are no deaths, but his father ends up in hospital after a car crash destroys the new car with him in it. Despite this, nobody is willing to believe Greg.
That is, until, he takes a couple of photos of Shari at her birthday - at her insistence - and instead of showing some horrific future for Shari, it doesn't show her at all. Shari does not appear in the photos Greg takes. And this too comes true! By the end of the day, Shari has vanished entirely.
Meanwhile, Spidey has begun his hunt for the missing camera. Greg spots Spidey following him around town, and returns home one day to find his room has been ransacked while the whole family was out. And I am sure there's a J. Jonah Jameson joke in here somewhere, but damnit, I just can't put my finger on it.
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| Camera. Spidey. Pictures. I know the joke is here somewhere! |
Shari is missing for a few days. Her family, friends, and the local police conduct a search of the town and the woods near her house, where she vanished, but Shari is nowhere to be found. Then, in a rage, Greg destroys the photos he took of her - the ones in which she did not appear - and as mysteriously as she vanished, Shari returns.
At last Greg's friends believe him about the camera, but all except Shari are too afraid to go back to the abandoned house with him and return it. So, in the final chapters, it is Shari and Greg who take the camera, on one not-so-ordinary 90s stormy afternoon, back to the neighbourhood abandoned house and place it back in the hidden compartment where Greg found it. At last the nightmare is over.
Except it isn't! Spidey finds them in the basement returning the camera and traps them. There, he explains that he, an evil scientist, invented the camera with a friend of his, an even-more evil wizard. But Spidey, whose real name is Frederick Fritz, stole the camera from his partner in... evil. As revenge, the wizard cursed the camera so that it would bring harm upon, and steal the soul of anybody who it took a photo of. The curse also made the camera impossible to destroy and I guess never run out of film. That's not said explicitly, but it's a fair assumption. Fritz decided to give up on his life of evil science and wizardry and hide the camera away forever, with him as its sole guardian. Alas, now that Greg and Shari know the secret of the camera, Fritz intends to keep them prisoner forever, so the secret never gets out.
A brief scuffle ensues and in the mayhem, the camera goes off, taking somebody's photo? But who.
Spidey, obviously, who immediately dies of fear for what the camera will do to him. Greg and Shari lock the camera away again and leave, putting the evil of the camera and of Dr Fritz to rest forever.
OR DO THEY!?
No. Because I know this book has at least two sequels and also it's not Goosebumps without a last minute twist ending. So as the novel closes, we see the two local token bullies stealing the camera from the house and running off into the spooky sunset to... Well, I don't know what they'll do. But RL Stine token bullies are almost as irredeemably sociopathic as Stephen King token bullies, so I'm sure it will be awful.
And I'm not going to say that is a highlight of Stine's writing. They are cheap, one-dimensional, throw-away secondary villains. Buuuuuut I got to admit, the idea of those two psychotic little shits with the cursed camera, stumbling arse first into its power, then terrorising the locals with it is a genuinely disturbing and frightening thought.
And that brings us to the important question. Is 'Say Cheese and Die!' a frightening story?
Well, there must be something scary about a cursed camera because this isn't the first time I've encountered it. 'Say Cheese and Die!' has a lot of similarities to the 2019 film 'Polaroid' directed by Lars Klevberg. The internet tells me that Polaroid was not well received, but I thought it was fine. 'Shutter' directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom in 2004 also heavily features photography as a horror motif. Spirit photography is a tradition almost as old as regular photography. So there must be something here. Do cameras frighten us?
Well, fear of technology is a common theme in horror fiction, but I think, when it comes to 'Say Cheese and Die!' and camera based horror in general, it's simpler than that.
Here is a quote from film maker Alfred Hitchcock.
"There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise’, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.
"Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’
“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense."
Suspense and horror go hand in hand. 'Say Cheese and Die!' utilises the same kind of suspense technique Hitchcock is talking about. We, the audience (and, in this case, eventually the story's protagonist), know the camera has some kind of curse or power, we know that what the photo shows will happen, and that the photo always shows something terrible. So from the moment Greg takes the photo and RL Stine gives the description of what is going to happen, we the audience are watching every line for indication that the terror is coming.
When Greg gets in the car the first time, after he sees the photo showing it wrecked, we know something bad is happening. We hold our breath, our muscles tighten, we read about the car swerving into on-coming traffic and our mind screams "THIS IS IT! THE BAD THING!"
And it doesn't happen that first time. But we know it will, eventually. So every time we see the car in the story, we say to ourselves "Is this it?"
And because what we know is coming is horrible, and because we care about the protagonist, we fear for them. Suspense becomes fear. And that's what horror is all about. Making us fear.
So was 'Say Cheese and Die!" frightening? Not in the same deeply visceral way that I found 'Stay Out of The Basement' frightening. But, again, that book was the perfect blend of elements to make my skin crawl. But 'Say Cheese and Die!' is very effective. I was afraid for Greg. I was holding my breath as he got in the car, and as Bird stepped out into the baseball field after we see a photo of him laying in the same field, looking like his neck is broken. So yeah. This one was frightening. This one was good.
And once again, each book comes with just the one analysis. So since we've taken the time to break down the elements of good writing and the techniques of the craft, you'll just have to wait until next time for the politics.
Yes, yes, I know.
The suspense is killing you, I'm sure.
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