Proper Masking Procedures
Hey there, lip filler injections. Happy Halloween! Or Halloween Eve, I guess. All Hallow's Eve Eve. Before I get to the next semi-lengthy series, let's do a little something in the spirit of the season. So on that note, let's visit a new edition from an old friend~
Giving you new Goosebumps! Or technically they're old Goosebumps. They're old Goosebumps in a new Goosebumps format. And that's cool! You know I had to check this out as soon as I heard about it. So far, this and Monster Blood have been adapted. This ain't counting the older "Goosebumps Graphix" volumes, which adapted three stories per book, each from a different artist. This is about equal to that in dimensions, so there won't be any need to distill the story. So I wonder what else might get the adaptation selection. Might I suggest Werewolf Skin~?
Should we actually talk about the cover? I guess so! It covers the interior art well, if that's a thing you need to be assured about. It's slightly more detailed, but very similar. And since there's no organic way to bring it up during the course of the story, the special features in the back really want you to know that this incarnation of the Haunted Mask, its ears are designed after the classic series Goosebumps "G". Once you notice it, it actually becomes kind of distracting! That's my Halloween trick for you, dear readers! To curse you with this knowledge! You won't un-see it if you check this story out for yourself!
So I know the story of The Haunted Mask. You know the story of The Haunted Mask. But let's do this anyway! Coz, like, the most interesting parts of an adaptation is the parts they have to change for the new medium, or stuff they add or expand on. Dominic Noble's not in fear of his job here or anything, but I still think it's interesting. And this one starts different right away, with a brief scene to actually introduce our main character Carly-Beth Caldwell, who notices a chill in the air as Halloween approaches. Yeah, it's late October. It does get chilly after a while.
Here's where the original book starts: with Carly-Beth's bestie Sabrina asking her about Halloween costumes in the cafeteria later. Carly-Beth suggests a witch, maybe? Sabrina, who's probably tired of being compared to teenage witches herself, is surprised. She thought witches would be too scary for Carly-Beth. Isn't the point of dressing up as something to take the power of its fear for your own? Anyway, Carly-Beth protests that she's not scared of witches, or of anything else that Sabrina lists off, only to shriek in fright when somebody drops their lunch tray.
So yeah, that's our protagonist: the daughter of Shaggy Rogers. Carly-Beth Caldwell, scaredy-cat extraordinaire. Sabrina is her mean best friend. Like, they're friends, but Sabrina's kind of jerky about it. Carly-Beth complains that she's not a scaredy-cat, and Sabrina relates the time Carly-Beth mistook Chuck and Steve wandering around her attic for ghosts. Carly-Beth protests that ghosts are scary, which is why she'll never be a Ghostbuster. While she's ranting about a plan to show she's the bravest this Halloween, a big green hand lands on her shoulder.
Of course, it's just the aforementioned Chuck and Steve, wearing one each of a pair of rubber monster hands (they were bare-handed in the book). They vow that they'll never get tired of scaring her. Sabrina asks what their science fair project is going to be, an app that plays recordings of their burps? They retort that of course not, it's of their farts. As you might guess, the setting has been updated to modern-day a bit, as the conversation about apps did not happen in the original book written in 1993.
We cut immediately to said science fair! Sabrina and Carly-Beth have made a model solar system, which is disappointing compared to some of the other projects. Carly-Beth's still proud of her work, though. Good for her. As she sets up their booth, there's a shout over the crowd: somebody's tarantula has gotten loose. Carly-Beth immediately begins panicking just imagining it, freezing up--at least until she feels something touch her leg. But it's only Steve doing a pinching motion with his fingers. Another "hilarious" prank, and Carly-Beth has now accidentally broken their display in her panic. Boy, I bet these kids go on to run a Youtube prank channel.
Carly-Beth goes home, angry and humiliated. Her mom greets her, hoping to cheer her daughter up by showing her a new art project. It's a head! Not just any head, though: an incredibly life-like sculpted head that looks like Carly-Beth. Despite her mother's work, Carly-Beth finds the realistic model of her own decapitation somewhat offputting for some reason, especially when she hallucinates it smiling at her and nearly drops it. Her mother retrieves her head, assuring her she made it because she loves her. I'd hate to see what she'd make if she hated her daughter.
She also lets Carly-Beth know the costume she asked for is ready. Carly-Beth replies that she didn't ask for a costume, and her mother goes "Of course you did, honey, don't you remember seeing that duck costume and saying it'd be funny to go as a duck?" Sheesh, I think that's paying a little too much attention to what your kids say. Carly-Beth, who does not want to be cute this Halloween, trudges upstairs to check out the duck costume. It'd already be pretty scary, given the realistic style it's drawn in, and it gets even scarier when it flails out of her room and attacks her.
But of course, it's not anything supernatural. It's only her little brother Noah, who also loves scaring Carly-Beth. This is no anime relationship, let me tell you. Mid-page, we cut to the next day, where the kids are having lunch again. Do they ever have class? Steve comes by and offers Carly-Beth a turkey sandwich, as an apology for his last prank. The apology falls short, though, as when Carly-Beth bites into the sandwich, she discovers it's full of earthworms. You're ten books early, guys! As an adaptation note, this scene and the science fair have switched places, and for the better, as this seems like way more of a last straw.
And a last straw it is! Vowing to pay them back in equal scares, not daring to wear her dumb duck costume, Carly-Beth snatches up her savings and goes storming out. There was a new store she noticed in the intro pages, maybe they'll have a cool mask she can buy. The shop's proprietor, a thin man with a thin moustache and a cape, is reluctant to let her in at first, then steps aside. He offers her a gorilla mask and then a mask based on R.L. Stine's own face (in the book, a Star Trek character), but neither is scary enough for Carly-Beth.
He lets her look around for a while, and she goes poking through the store. As he starts to get more and more cross with her hesitancy, he's about to ask her to leave (they're technically closed, after all) when he's interrupted by a phone call. While he's distracted, Carly-Beth wanders into a curtained-off backroom. This is where she finds several shelves of much scarier, grotesque masks. A particular green, bald-headed one catches her eye. She reaches out for it, only to be startled when a voice yells out as she makes contact.
Not from the mask, of course, but from behind her. The shopkeeper apologises, these masks are not for sale. Carly-Beth protests that these are perfect, they're exactly what she needs to scare Chuck and Steve. He remains steadfast, insisting that he can't take responsibility for what will happen and that she will be sorry if she puts it on, but relents when she starts crying. He accepts $50 for the mask, and Carly-Beth takes off into the night with her prize, not even slowing down long enough for him to offer her a bag.
Carly-Beth returns home, overcome with an urge to try out her new mask. And her little brother Noah would be the perfect target. She dons the mask, then sneaks up to her brother's room. He's trying on his own costume (a cockroach), and she leaps out with a nasty growl in her throat. One advantage of the comic is that you can tell the change in Carly-Beth's voice by a font change. She continues her snarls until her brother is practically pissing himself, at which point her voice slips back to its normal register and she claims responsibility. She tries to tug off the mask to bask in her victory, but the mask is stuck to her face.
Except it's not, it just takes a couple more pulls to come off. She was spooked for a minute there! With her brother now thusly terrified, Carly-Beth looks for a way to elevate the costume. Spotting the scupted head her mother crafted, she affixes it to the end of a broom handle (the head is hollow) and dons a brown trenchcoat. Carly-Beth no longer! She's now the Maple Avenue Terror! Eager to go terrifying the populace, Carly-Beth sneaks out before her mother can discover she's not wearing the duck costume.
Out stalking the streets, Carly-Beth attempts to scare the first pair of boys she sees, only for them to not turn out to be Chuck and Steve. Her mom tries to usher them away from the weird girl harassing them, and Carly-Beth snaps angrily at her. The commotion draws Sabrina out of her house, and she's dressed as Cat Woman. No, not the DC character. A legally distinct Cat Woman with a space in the name. There's a whole exposition joke about it, because the original book very clearly intended it to be Catwoman, describing a silvery catsuit she wore (fitting Catwoman's appearance in B:TAS, which would've been out by that time). Here, Sabrina is wearing a more age-appropriate pink costume with cat face-paint.
As the pair walk along, Sabrina continues to chatter away about the parties she's intending to attend that night, commenting further on Carly-Beth's mask, until Carly-Beth finally snaps and attempts to strangle Sabrina. She plays it off like a joke, that she's getting into character, but Sabrina is pretty rattled. This goes further as they trick-or-treat, when a mom and her young kids answer the door. The young daughter gets nervous about Carly-Beth's ugly mask, and her mom tries to reassure her it's only pretend. Carly-Beth, though, growls a threat of "I'll eat you up!" in the scary font to the child, making her cry.
Sabrina tells her that was mean, and Carly-Beth responds "The mask made me do it." This bit is a flaw with the adaptation, coz you don't get to hear her inner thoughts worrying if that's actually true. At the next house, when Carly-Beth receives an apple, she hucks it back at the house. And just to contradict my point a page ago, now the comic gives us narration captions just so it can split the girls up. This leads to a montage of Carly-Beth scaring various children and getting more bestial in her mannerisms as she goes.
Finally, she locates Chuck and Steve. At first, her old fears begin to overwhelm her: what if she can't do it? What if she jumps out and they just laugh at her attempt? The thoughts of this begin to bubble over, and soon the anger of being scared so often, everything they've done to her, boils over. Her heartbeat thudding so loud she can't hear anything else, she approaches the two boys and lets out an unearthly howl. At first they don't recognise her at all, but they do recognise the head on the end of her stick.
They tremble before Carly-Beth, asking her to cut out her scare routine. Carly-Beth, however, keeps insisting on them turning over their candy, or she'll add their heads to her stick. She holds it out to emphasise this. And that's when the plaster head blinks. It looks Chuck and Steve up and down, and says "Help me." The pair of them bolt like rabbits, screaming all the while. And either Carly-Beth didn't hear her own decap-double speak or doesn't care, as she's too engrossed in her feeling of absolute triumph. She abandons the stick and head in favour of the sacks of candy, heading home as the narration talks about her victory.
She meets back up with Sabrina, more casually playing off her victory until asked about it directly. The pair go inside to pore over their hauls, and eventually Sabrina mentions that Carly-Beth must be boiling in her mask. Carly-Beth forgot she even was wearing one. As she goes to pull it off… she's not. There's no edge between her skin and the mask anymore. And as she catches sight of herself in the mirror, she can't see her own eyes looking out at her through the mask anymore. Is she even inside there anymore? She begins to panic.
Carly-Beth runs out of Sabrina's house, eventually heading towards the little shop she bought the mask from. The salesman is there waiting for her, as he had a feeling she'd be back. She asks if he can take the mask off, and he can't--because it's not a mask. It's a real face. You see, he was working in his lab late one night, when his eyes beheld an eerie sight. The beautiful, living heads he was intending to create turned out… bad. The experiment failed. But despite everything, he couldn't bear to let them die. So he keeps them alive in his back room. And every once in a while, someone wanders back there, and his Unloved faces find a new home.
Carly-Beth sobs that she doesn't want to be a monster, and the shopkeeper tells her there may be one chance still. He can't take it off, but it may be removed. But if anyone else puts it on again, this time it will be forever. The mask can only be removed by a symbol of love. She doesn't know what that means, and he says he can tell her no more than that. She begins getting upset, the angry side of the mask coming out, and she tries to threaten him, But as she starts yelling, the noise wakes up the other Unloved. He yells for her to run, and as she races from the building, the other masks begin flying after her.
As she exits pursued by flying masks, like she's carrying a key in Super Mario 2, her mind races about what the store owner said. A symbol of love… And a thought cracks into her brain: the plaster head. Didn't her mom said she made it because she loved her? It was weird to say, but she needed to set up the plot detail for later. The only problem is, she has to find where she dropped that head. And by luck or plot contrivance, her path out of the costume shop has taken her directly to the playground where she scared Chuck and Steve.
She finds the head propped up against a tree, oddly enough. She grabs it, shouts that it is a symbol of love, then jams the plaster head over her own. Somehow it fits. And while in the darkness of her art project visage, she has a strange vision, of her own head and the mask on separate sticks. She can't move through the darkness, and whatever the heads chasing her are going to do, she'd like to see her fate. She removes the plaster head, only to find all the Unloved have vanished. And… she can feel the breeze on the back of her neck.
She reaches behind her and pulls off the mask, vowing never to wear it again. Without another thought, she heads for home, eager to see a mirror. Her brother greets her with a joke about how horrifying her face is, but when she checks, she's unchanged. She hugs her mom, who's glad to see her. She and Sabrina have been worried. Carly-Beth says it's a long story, and her mom goes to get her some cocoa. But as she waits, she hears a familiar growling voice behind her. "Hey, Carly-Beth," Noah says, "How do I look in your mask?"
Honestly, it's a really faithful adaptation of one of the better Goosebumps books. The whole book is pretty much in there, and the few changes only help. Re-arranging the tarantula scene with the worm sandwich scene made a lot of sense, as it seems like the latter would push Carly-Beth over the line way more. The attempts to modernise the comic are pretty few, which is nice. And as a compliment to the art, most of the book, you can see Carly-Beth's eyes through the mask and a few tufts of hair peeking out the back. Once she scares Chuck and Steve, though, these details vanish. If you're looking for it, you can spot it, and it pays off. Really good adaptation~
There's also a few bits in the back after the story, which includes both a bunch of the author's notes on the process for several details, a few development sketches and 3D models that were used to illustrate both book and cover, and even some 4koma-style comics lampshading a few details (like why the clerk sold her the mask in the first place). Really worth picking up for those kind of things.
Well, with October over, next week we'll be knocking down that thing that Primer was setting up~
