Creepy Canadian Kids Shows: Goosebumps & Cryptkeeper (Part 2)

 

Creepy Canadian Kids Shows (Part 2 of 2)

 

In Part One, I went over a number of shows I watched in the late 1990s and early 2000s that aided in my love of all things horror, ending with YTV’s Freaky Stories (1997-99). There was another live-action show that aired on YTV at night, and it’s tied right next to Freaky Stories in my memory. It was based on the children’s books I mentioned in the intro of Part One, also titled Goosebumps (1995-98). To name a young boy from my generation who didn’t read at least one of those books is to name a boy who does not exist. Girls read them, too, but most of the stories seemed to feature young male protagonists who get tied up in some kind of spooky narrative that would feature a generic monster or cliché situation. Some stories were more creative than others, but a number of them were brought to vivid life in my imagination through great descriptions by author R.L. Stine, and when I found out there was a show based directly on the books, I had to watch it, because I wanted to see what I had read play out on my TV screen in spectacularly shocking fashion!

I can’t recap every episode I ever watched, but I will highlight a few that still stick with me—some that I found genuinely scary, and some that were genuinely disappointing. The premiere episode of the first season happened to be based on one of the first books I read in the series, The Haunted Mask. As a developing reader, my imagination often placed the characters and action in settings I could easily picture, meaning most of the story took place (in my mind) in my neighbourhood, which actually made it creepier. Goosebumps represents a milestone for me: it was my first experience watching an adaptation of something I had read first, and I reacted the way we often react to adaptations of stories we loved: “Why did they change that?” It was fascinating to see familiar story elements play out in a similar way to how they had been written, yet also frustrating when it didn’t look exactly the way I had pictured it in my mind.

“The Haunted Mask” is widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, and R.L. Stine himself has said it is his favourite adaptation. I think it’s easy to see why. It was made as a two-parter (most of my favourite episodes were), which meant not too much of the story had to be cut down, and the premise of an evil Halloween mask is simple but unsettling. The show hit the ground running, and ran for three seasons, adapting numerous stories from the original 62 books and beyond. I never watched the show consistently because it aired as late night re-runs that played at random, but looking back on it, I saw very few episodes from the first season. Sometimes if I didn’t recognize the episode title from the books I skipped it. The old saying is not to judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Goosebumps, I always did that, and it was an effective strategy. I preferred the stories about monsters and weird stuff; titles like “My Hairiest Adventure” and “A Night in Terror Tower” didn’t really appeal to me. The covers were great, though, and usually represented the best parts of the books well.

The problems the Goosebumps TV series repeatedly faced over its three seasons were low production values, inexperienced child actors, and runtimes that couldn’t always accommodate the full breadth of the spooky source material. One of the books I really enjoyed was How to Kill a Monster: a great title, great premise, and great fun to read. The episode’s setting looked utterly unlike how I had pictured the house, the kids were really annoying, and worst of all was the monster itself. Only the monster’s green, fuzzy hands are shown on the book’s cover reaching out from behind a door. In the episode, it’s a brown, scaly thing that’s shown in broad daylight way too often to really be scary. I think I saw this episode around the time I started watching movies with real scary monsters, like Aliens (the monster makes the same roar as the xenomorphs in Aliens, by the way) and it really paled in comparison. There were some other episodes that had a few good moments or at least good endings (such as “Bad Hare Day” and “Haunted Mask II” [also a two-parter]), but as with any anthology series like this, there were bound to be inconsistencies from one episode to the next. Some stories weren’t as scary, which was by design, and even the sillier ones were often entertaining, like “Shocker on Shock Street” and “Say Cheese and Die.” Fun side note: the protagonist Greg in “Say Cheese and Die” is played by a young Ryan Gosling!

There are a couple episodes from the second season that got the job done of giving me a scare. “The Headless Ghost” is an atmospheric chiller about a seaside haunted house, and the tour guide, Otto, turns out to be one of the ghosts haunting the place! I distinctly remember my mom commenting on this episode being scary, which just made me want to keep watching even more. I’m not sure if she was being serious or projecting concerns that it would give me nightmares—which it didn’t, because I never found ghosts all that scary, but one episode that did leave me pretty rattled was “Scarecrow Walks at Midnight.” I had never read the book, so I didn’t know what the plot would be about, and I watched it at our neighbour’s house in their dark basement, alone, so that definitely aided in the fright factor. The farm at night looked a little too similar to my aunt’s farm, and the scarecrows had a simple but scary design. But the scariest episode of all, for me, was “Werewolf Skin” from the third season. It built up the suspenseful story in the first half, then ended with a shocking cliffhanger of a werewolf trying to attack the main character through bars on his windows. That episode actually left me too scared to go to sleep.

Looking back on it, Goosebumps is really corny and not scary at all, but I’m still slightly nostalgic for the charm of the show's cheap 90’s production values, and for certain episodes. It fits in with the vibe of other shows from around that time like Are You Afraid of the Dark and Freaky Stories, and while R.L. Stine went on to write other YA horror series’ like Fear Street and Mostly Ghostly, as well as have his work further adapted to TV and to film, the 90’s was peak Goosebumps era, and in spite of its limitations, the show managed to immortalize that.

I saved the best of the many youthful Canadian horror shows for last. Tales from the Cryptkeeper (1993-1999) aired on Teletoon on Sundays in the early 2000s, but during the month of October I remember more episodes would air, because it was the ultimate animated series for kids who loved horror, and monsters in particular. Unlike the many cliché elements from Goosebumps, Tales from the Cryptkeeper featured some familiar monsters in unfamiliar stories, and original monsters in stories that were sometimes unpredictable. They might turn out to be pretty funny (on purpose) but some ended in ways that did not feel like your typical cartoon. The reason this show was so great, as I later found out, was because it had been spun off from HBO’s live-action Tales from the Crypt, which was based on the EC comics of the same name from the 1950s. Cryptkeeper told some incredibly chilling tales (for a cartoon, anyway) that often taught moral lessons and had immoral characters punished for their immorality.

Even though it has an anthology format in the same vein as Freaky Stories and Goosebumps (more like the latter), there are some recurring characters who pop up in multiple episodes, and the Cryptkeeper himself sometimes cameos in the stories, as well. John Kassir, who also voiced him in the live-action series, has the perfect cackling rasp and laugh. Cryptkeeper is the most iconic horror anthology host of all-time. Others have tried to imitate his mix of chilling, macabre narration with dark, pun-filled jabs, but none have surpassed him. Sometimes the intro/outro segments with him get pretty silly, but it’s all in classic cartoon conventions, and the stories proper may have goofy moments throughout, but these don’t usually undercut the tension or scares. Compared to Goosebumps, Tales from the Cryptkeeper felt like it was trying harder to scare you, and I think because it was animated, they were allowed to push the scares further and get more creative with the interpretation of the source material.

The second episode has one of the stories I remember best: “Nature” is about two brothers who get shrunk down to ant size and must survive being taken into the colony! They burn some ants with a magnifying glass at the beginning of the episode, so it’s one of those morality tales, but that’s the show’s format, and the stories have enough variety that it doesn’t get old or repetitive—at least, not in the first season. One of the episodes that scared me and thrilled me the most was “Hunted.” A relentless hunter in the Amazon pursues the wrong prey: a shapeshifting monster. There’s plenty of action and thrills along the way, but we don’t see the beast in full until the end, and it is a tense showdown between hunter and hunted, with a twist ending that left a cold knot in my stomach even on repeat viewings.

I can’t really do all the stories justice. The show tackles everything from a thawed-out Neanderthal on the loose to a wax museum with monsters that come to life. There are updates on classic tales like “Gorilla’s Paw” (The Monkey’s Paw) and “This Wraps It Up” (The Mummy), then there are more original ones like “Uncle Harry’s Horrible House of Horrors” where a kid enjoys a haunted house ride for his birthday at a theme park and his disbelieving uncle gets the fright of his life. The show alternates between just one story for the whole episode or splitting the runtime between two shorter ones, which adds some nice variety to the pacing of each episode. I actually find the music more intense in the cartoon compared to the HBO show, and while some of the musical themes are repeated over and over throughout the series, they’re still effective.

The first season had just Cryptkeeper hosting the show, but then in season two The Old Witch and The Vaultkeeper were introduced, and they try to take over hosting duties, with Cryptkeeper attempting to fight them off, sometimes to no avail. I didn’t really notice it as much when I was a kid, mainly because I saw the episodes out of order, but looking back, it kind of seems like an unnecessary change, and sometimes gets annoying, but it didn’t ruin the quality of the stories being told. Season three had a delayed premiere five years after the second season ended, and was rebranded as New Tales from the Cryptkeeper, which reduced Cryptkeeper’s hosting role, removed the other two wannabe hosts entirely, and featured a different animation style, with only one story per episode. I hardly saw any episodes from this season as a kid, and I don’t think it’s as fondly remembered as seasons one or two.

Tales from the Cryptkeeper retains everything essential from the HBO show and source material predating it and adapts many of the classic stories pretty faithfully while changing some things to make it acceptable for young viewers, though still pushing the limit from time to time. Of all the Canadian kids’ horror shows I’ve covered in this two-parter of mine, I recommend checking this one out the most. I think it holds up the best overall, and I still enjoy putting on a handful of episodes in the month of October.

“So until next time, boils and ghouls…pleasant screams!”

 

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Top 5 Best DVD Finds: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/07/top-five-best-dvdblu-ray-finds-ccc.html