by Zakiyyah Madyun, Staff Writer

For this year’s SpookyJawn, I’ll be covering a series of adaptations that haunted my impressionable young mind and frequently appeared in my nightmares: Goosebumps. My credentials? A scavenged childhood book collection, several with holographic covers, an inherited VHS set to match, and a lifelong fear of Slappy.

One of the most famous Goosebumps episodes is called The Haunted Mask, and it features a premise I could imagine being adapted into a movie for adults. Middle-schooler Carly Beth, who is afraid of everything, is tired of being ridiculed and humiliated by her peers. She goes to a creepy costume shop in search of a Halloween costume to scare her bullies and leaves with a disgusting looking mask. The mask becomes increasingly difficult to remove, until it eventually merges with Carly Beth and becomes her face.

One thing that stands out to about this episode is that the mask that Carly Beth wears is genuinely grotesque. The mangled yellow teeth and the attention to detail could pass in a movie for older audiences. I can easily imagine a Robert Eggers folktale where a medieval villager receives a mask from a witch on the outskirts of town that he can’t take off. Or maybe in modern times, an older sullen-eyed teenager puts on the mask Talk to Me-style in an ill-fated party game. Unfortunately, in the updated release of the episode, helicopter-parenting prevailed and the actively perspiring goblin mask was replaced with a Gollum-esque iteration with only slightly pointy teeth.

If you’re a fan of The Twilight Zone, you might remember a similar episode called The Masks, in which a group of greedy heirs unwittingly find their faces permanently molded in shapes as unflattering as their personalities. The arrangement of masks in both episodes make it hard to imagine there wasn’t a little inspiration taking place. Unlike the masks of The Masks however, Carly Beth’s collection can move, talk, and eventually fly off their stands to chase her to a cemetery.

Of all of the Goosebumps entries I’ve covered so far, Carly Beth’s story had me feeling the most sympathetic towards her. She’s a nice girl who just struggles to be herself. The bullying at her school is so bad at one point that she’s tricked into eating a sandwich with a live worm in it. Her mother is no help, and at one point gives Carly Beth a porcelain head of herself she made at pottery class. Believe it or not, there have been worse parents in this series. For its commitment to 90s special effects madness, The Haunted Mask rounds up with four out of five Goosebumps.