Are You Afrid of the Dark: The Tale of Laughing in the Dark

A real problem with going into these shows after so many years is that I’m effectively blind for what is and isn’t normal.  This means that I can only comment on what seems notable at the time, and if an element proves to be omnipresent in later episodes I may stop mentioning it.  On the other hand, if I suspect an element will be omnipresent and it isn’t, then I may only notice it when it’s gone.

I say this because both of these first two episodes do seem, more-or-less, like the kind of scary stories kids would tell each other.  They’re a bit stretched out, as I said in my previous review, as I can’t recall any campfire stories lasting longer than five minutes when I was a kid.  But they still have the basic elements of mundane life interrupted by the supernatural in a way more dictated by emotions than logic.

That may change in later episodes, but for these first two that’s exactly what we get, and it works to the show’s benefit.  Here, we get the first story of Betty Ann (Raine Pare-Coull), but the focus of the host segments is clearly on Kristen (Rachel Blanchard), who is revealed to be scared of clowns.

The host segments of this episode serve to give us some good characterization for The Midnight Society.  The group as a whole seem to see Kristen as “Miss Perfect,” and it’s obvious throughout the episode that she’s trying to balance her emotions as she’s compelled to run, determined to convince her friends that there’s no chink in her armor of courage, and trying to maintain an appearance of maturity over the two conflicting desires, both of which she realizes at some level are rather childish.  I was surprised that the ending made it clear that she hadn’t overcome her fears in thirty minutes, but I liked that point.  It was far more realistic, and her fake-out “oh, I’m over it now” was priceless when the façade was broken.

The rest of the group, however, seems to almost revel in Kristen’s discomfort, and are characterized by how overt they are with their antagonism.  Betty Ann seems to almost be trying to pass the buck, acting as if she came up with a clown story totally by coincidence, and it absolutely has nothing to do with Kristen.  Eric (Jacob Tierney), on the other hand, outright jumps her with a mask at the end, setting him up as the closest thing our framing stories have to an antagonist.  Most of the other members falls somewhere in-between these two extremes.

The child actors in this story aren’t nearly as bad as in the previous one.  Not great, but a step up.  The writing doesn’t hurt either, as the characters aren’t completely exaggerated to better fit their roles.  The main character, Josh (Christian Tessier), is motivated in the story to prove he’s braver than his friend Weegee (Daniel Finestone), or Weegee’s younger sister Kathy (Tamar Kozlov), but this motivation doesn’t come across as some obsession driving his life.  He just happens to be in a situation where his courage is in question, and he gets himself in a bind trying to prove it.

To talk about the actual plot: The three go to an amusement park called Playland.  Many years ago, a clown named Zeebo (Aron Tager returning for his only non-Vink episode) attempted to steal the park’s payroll, and ran into the Funhouse.  However, Zeebo carelessly threw away a cigar in the Funhouse, and inadvertently burned himself to death.  As a morbid joke, the current Funhouse was converted into a memorial to Zeebo, themed around the idea that if you pick the correct door you can proceed, but if you pick the wrong door a Zeebo dummy will jump out and scare you.

On their initial trip to the Park, the three are introduced to the Funhouse by a cigar smoking Carney (Tager in a duel role), but Josh backs out, and the other two seem uninterested.  Weegee and Kathy are interesting characters, because they’re primarily portrayed as simply two people who believe in ghosts.  To them entering the Funhouse would be like running across the street without checking for traffic: not so much brave as a stupid and unnecessary risk.  They’re not portrayed as overly fearful, or as new age nuts.  They’re just two people who happen to believe that ghosts are real, and best to be avoided.  Thus, they bring out antagonism from Josh.  After the conflict escalates, Weegee dares Josh to go back to the Funhouse, and Josh finds himself accepting the challenge.

The challenge, however, comes with a caveat: When Josh meets Zeebo, he will steal the clown’s nose to prove he went through, and in exchange Weegee will wear it to school for a week.  I’m a bit uncertain why the morality of stealing or vandalizing a Funhouse isn’t discussed here, let alone the problems that always comes with stealing from a ghost.  The episode seems to just assume that petty theft of small objects is something children are generally okay with.  To be fair, my memory of childhood more-or-less fits with that depiction, and the story needed to move forward.

The episode adds a nice touch by having Josh initially pick the correct door to get out of the Funhouse without encountering Zeebo, giving him an easy out.  It’s purely due to pride that Josh goes back and searches for the “wrong” door to find Zeebo.  There can be no excuse when he takes the nose it was an active choice to the last moment.

The actual scene in which the encounter happens is probably the point at which the acting is the weakest, and I think it highlights a problem that I intend to be on the lookout for as this show goes forward: the horror can only be greeted with an extended, audible scream.  Not a gasp, or a jump, or nervousness.  Our protagonist must exhaust his lungs on a long scream, which really kills the scene.  The fact that it happens twice in the episode certainly doesn’t help.  If they’d just allowed the actor to react more naturally to something creepy it would have worked much better.

As for Zeebo’s return, I was legitimately kind of surprised by the ambiguity.  While home alone Josh is haunted by the smell of cigars, strange noises, and a mysterious footprint in pudding.  Things become more overt when he gets scary phone calls, and his dinner is switched in the microwave with cigarette butts (this is when we get the second unnecessary scream).  The final straw before Josh breaks and goes to return the cigar is a balloon being slid under his bedroom door and then inflated to reveal a note reading “Give It Back.”

The ending is one point I love: Josh returns the nose, with a pack of cigars to apologize, and…leaves.  Rather than a final scare the Carney closes the episode with another pitch.  Zeebo is never defeated, Josh just determines that he’s facing something he can’t win against, and appeasement is the only option.  It’s not and ending we see very often, at least not without the monster being made sympathetic.  However, Zeebo is clearly not some cuddly monster who needs a hug.

The ending of the episode obviously leaves us with some room for interpretation.  The dual role Tager played obviously leaves us with the possibility that the Carney was responsible for everything, attempting to scare Josh, or even that the Carney was the ghost of Zeebo all along.  Commenting on the Carney, he’s a fun character, who basically says nothing that doesn’t sound like a pitch, leaving him ironically as an almost blank slate onto which evil can easily be projected.

However, this effect is somewhat neutralized by the fact that the Midnight Society has to talk about it.  It makes a degree of sense.  Kids might not have picked up on the idea so quickly, and obviously, horror buffs who just heard the story would want to talk about it.  It’s not a deal breaker for the episode, but it doesn’t help.  As an adult, having the ambiguity spelled out to be just kills the mood.

Overall, this episode is probably the stronger of the first two.  They’re both easily better than anything in Goosebumps.  They’re far from perfect, every show must make compromises, and shows for kids doubly so.  But they work for half-hour stories.