"You know, Horrorland may seem like a scary, foreboding place... because it is! For me, waking each noon to the tortured screams of terrified tots... t-t-to see children crying hysterically in fear... to hear their unbridled shrieks... (serenely smiling while tormented children can be heard screaming in the background) what could possibly be more fun?"
—Madison Storm, Escape from Horrorland
Troper beware, you're in for a scare! Complete Monsters from Goosebumps.
Entries within each group are by publication/release date.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
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Examples
- Night of the Living Dummy (and related books): Slappy the Dummy, crafted from a coffin by an Evil Sorcerer who then transferred his evil influence and soul into the dummy, comes to life whenever the spell that accompanies him is read aloud. He would turn his owner's family against them, which ultimately culminates in him trying to convert the family, preferably the female protagonists, into his slaves. He later held a group of children celebrating a birthday party hostage, and he threatened to murder everyone in the room if he didn't receive his bride. He orders Jillian Zinman, the preteen protagonist of Bride..., to be his bride, only to violently hit her when she refused. Slappy has attempted to murder several characters throughout the saga, one notable example when he tried to decapitate a young boy with a pair of garden shears. Sadistic, cruel, and disturbing, Slappy struck fear in the hearts of many.
- Original Series:
- The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb: Ahmed, ostensibly an unassuming subordinate of archaeologist Ben Hassad, is actually a religious fanatic who kills anyone who disturbs the tomb of Priestess Khala. Initially trying to convince Ben and his crew to abandon their archaeological dig, when Ben continues his work, Ahmed attempts to abduct Ben's daughter Sari and her cousin, Gabe Sabry, from a museum. During his next encounter with Gabe, Sari, and Ben—Gabe having discovered the mummified corpses of Ahmed's previous victims—Ahmed captures the trio in sarcophagi, intending to repeat the mummification process which involves disembowelment, brain extraction, and boiling tar. Frustrated by their attempted escape, Ahmed makes a final attempt to boil the trio in tar before being thwarted by a supernatural occurrence.
- Piano Lessons Can Be Murder: Andrew Toggle runs the piano school where Jerry Hawkins's parents send him. While he appears to be a friendly, eccentric caretaker who shows Jerry around the school, it soon becomes clear who he really is. Creating Dr. Shreek to act as a figurehead, Toggle would lure people of all ages to his school for lessons, only to murder them and make their hands into piano-playing automatons. One victim's ghost was condemned to haunt Jerry's house to warn him away, and it's implied at one point that he could hear another crying for help. When the boy finally discovers his crimes, Toggle calmly explains that he did it partially to further his robotics research and also because he thinks music sounds so much better without human mistakes.
- A Night in Terror Tower & Return to Terror Tower: King Robert usurped control of medieval York by murdering his brother and sister-in-law, whose children, Princess Susannah and Prince Edward, he then locked away in Terror Tower, the entrance of which he then cursed so that anyone who tries to enter it without a key is turned to stone, a fate which has befallen dozens. When a family friend tried to rescue the children, Robert had the family friend killed and condemned to haunt the royal palace as a ghost until he is deposed. Using a magic amulet, Robert proceeded to brainwash every member of the royal court into serving him, rechristening one man the Lord High Executioner. Under his tyranny, York descends into poverty and squalor; hypnotized soldiers routinely terrorize and steal from the peasantry, and haul suspected dissidents and any man, woman and child who is to pay his exorbitantly high taxes off to the dungeons, where they are tortured and either beheaded or left to rot, being thrown scraps once a week. Eventually deciding to eliminate Eddie and Sue, he instructs the Executioner to smother them, and when a sympathetic wizard named Morgred uses three magic stones to send the children to the future, he sends the Executioner after them, and cows Morgred into serving him by threatening him with torture and painful death. In Return's worst possible ending, he steals Morgred's magic stones, has Eddie and Sue executed, and amuses himself by forcing their cousin to dance around the throne room while avoiding blades before having them stabbed to death.
- Tales to Give You Goosebumps' "Broken Dolls": The Dollmaker is a mysterious, elderly sculptor with a large collection of life-like dolls. To create these, the Dollmaker would smear countless victims—implied to be mostly children—with "Dolly Jelly", a substance that painfully drains them of life to trap their souls in porcelain figures, all still aware and barely able to even cry for help. Initially seeming polite and grandmotherly to Tamara Baker and her little brother Neal, the Dollmaker tries to add Neal to her collection. When Tamara discovers the old woman's secret, the Dollmaker brushes off the girl's horror and anger, claiming that children today simply don't understand her ways. She then prepares to dispose of Tamara with the Jelly, coldly taunting her that children go missing so often this century, and that she'll just be one more.
- Give Yourself Goosebumps:
- Escape from Camp Run-for-Your-Life: Coach Rex is the owner of Camp Running Leaf, a children's sports camp which is secretly a front for a race of malevolent extraterrestrials known as the Xentronians. Hired by the Xentronians to provide them with slaves, Rex and his accomplices force the campers to consume special blue eggs that make them highly suggestible before having them participate in deadly games as training for a life of slavery on Xentron, where they will eventually be worked to death or Eaten Alive. Campers are mangled or killed in droves, while the one who bests all of the others and wins every competition is awarded the honor of being appointed the personal slave of the Overmaster of Xentron, a position which Rex happily explains entails "much pain, and eventually a gruesome death". Rex also pays people to abduct children for him, and when a government agent is caught investigating the campgrounds, he has her murdered and her body dumped in a lake.
- Trapped in the Circus of Fear: Mistress Barbara, real name "Barbarous", runs a Circus of Fear, tricking children into joining her traveling circus only to have them turned into an unperson and added into her collection of sideshow freaks. Her circus having operating for years and abducting untold amounts of children, Barbara uses her magical pendant to forcibly convert kids into various abominations, such as the kid with rotten flesh, the living bucket of sapient vomit, or the lizard boy, and deliberately allows her escaped victims to flee before ordering them hunted down, toying with them repeatedly before eventually capturing and devouring them alive, as well as using her magic to force a benevolent gypsy musician to play a magical tune that makes her victims dance until they died of exhaustion.
- Goosebumps 2000's Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls: Oswald Manse was a teenage criminal who terrorized the aptly named town of Highgrave with his brother Martin. The two started a fire that destroyed half the town and caused hundreds of casualties, condemning the souls of the victims to haunt the cemetery as "Graveyard Ghouls", unable to leave without taking someone else's body. Years later, when the protagonist, Spencer Kassimir, stumbles across the brothers' grave, Oswald, now a ghoul himself, hijacks his body, leaving Spencer a disembodied spirit. After adjusting to his new form, Manse goes on a violent rampage and begins setting fire to the neighborhood before trying to incinerate Spencer's body so he can move onto a stronger one, all while gloating how powerless the boy is to stop him. When Spencer thwarts him, Oswald reunites with his brother's ghoul, and the two try to murder Spencer's family with fire axes out of spite. An unrepentant maniac who took sheer thrill in the terror and destruction he spread, Oswald was reviled and feared, even among his fellow ghouls.
- HorrorLand's Who's Your Mummy?: Tuttan-Rha, a 2000-year old Egyptian alchemist, discovered that he could prolong his own life by cannibalizing living mummies, which he creates through a resurrection ritual that involves a special protein found only in naturally straight, jet-black human hair. The mummies, decayed on the outside but "fresh" on the inside, are fully aware and conscious, but unable to do anything other than beg for death as they're gradually consumed over the course of several years by Rha. To get the protein that he needs to revive mummies and keep them alive, Ra captures people whose hair contains it, and holds them prisoner until their hair begins to grey with age, at which point he disposes of them. Becoming aware of two dark-haired siblings named Abby and Peter Martin, Rha poses as their Uncle Jonathan to lure them to his mansion, where the children eventually walk in on him ripping out and eating a mummy's internal organs. Recapturing Abby and Peter after they run away, Rha explains his immortality and why he wants their hair to them as he shows the terrified children his collection of partially-devoured mummies, all of whom are pleading to be allowed to die. When the real Uncle Jonathan appears to try and save his relatives, Rha gleefully tries to strangle him to death in front of Abby and Peter.
Examples
- Slappy the Dummy is the same sadistic Control Freak he was in the books, and in some ways is even more dangerous. In his debut episode, Slappy set out to ruin his new owner Amy's life by framing her for a series of escalating misdeeds, from breaking a child's hand to sneaking into her parents' room to smash a guitar over them For the Evulz. Slappy brought a dummy named Rocky to life in his second appearance as part of his scheme to take the household and convert the family into his slaves. For amusement, Slappy transforms the protagonists' cousin into a helpless dummy aware of his current state but unable to do anything about it. In his final appearance, Slappy targets another pair of sisters after striking a deal with a failing ventriloquist. Around that time, Slappy entertains himself with murdering other sapient dummies and keeping their shards as trophies. He then tries to make the protagonist's younger sister his bride and, upon being destroyed, latches himself onto the protagonist's younger brother.
- "Chillogy": Karl Knave gets sick pleasure out of physically and mentally torturing kids simply because it's his hobby. He transports them into his miniature town and personal playground Karlsville, where he toys with them before he plans to kill them. Karl manipulates Jessica into pursuing her own greed to sell more of his lemonade, then turns her into a pig and sends a mob of angry townspeople after her to serve her up to him for lunch. He plays a lethal game of baseball with Matthew where Matthew has to do such things as fight a team of monsters, dodge killer baseballs, and crawl over a lava pit to make it to the next base. Karl's last victim is Matthew's brother Todd, whom he prepares to "make a citizen of Karlsville" by turning him into a small plastic figure who will be forever conscious. He delays Todd's fate as long as he possibly can to enjoy Todd's fear.
Video Games
Examples
- Escape from Horrorland: Madison Storm, blaming the whole world for his lonely childhood, decided to make everyone as miserable as he was by constructing Horrorland. Drawing ghouls from all over the universe to the park using a device called the Cosmic Monster Attractor, Storm has them terrorize and kill people while he records it for broadcast on the Monster Channel. Anyone who survives the park's deadly rides and attractions gets fed to beasts or drowned, with Storm at one point musing that his preferred victims are children, whose terrified shrieks and cries are music to his ears. After the Morris family and their friend Clay manage to make it out of Horrorland alive, the enraged Storm teleports them and the Player Character back to the park and subjects them to its latest horrors, all the while toying with them by pretending to be a benevolent Horror named Stump. Storm eventually reveals that he is holding Mr. and Mrs. Morris captive, and that he is going to make the children watch while he either crushes them or mutates them into Horrors. When Clay accidentally causes the Cosmic Monster Attractor to begin malfunctioning, Storm refuses to fix the device, instead deciding to let it meltdown so that the captured children and Morris parents will be blown up by it, along with the rest of Horrorland.
- Attack of the Mutant: The Masked Mutant is a comic book supervillain who wants to conquer both his own world and the Earth. To accomplish this, the Mutant has a Slave Race called the Toadies construct the Green Beam, a device that will merge the comic book world and the Earth by converting the latter to 2-D. The Mutant allows the cruel taskmaster the Wicked Wartlock to brutalize and kill the Toadies as he sees fit, and once they finish the Green Beam, the Mutant abducts young children to use as test subjects, turning several into lifeless cutouts that are frozen mid-scream and callously dumped in a storage room in Mutant Headquarters. When the protagonist and the League of Good Guys invade his HQ, the Mutant deploys his henchmen to kill them as he kickstarts "Operation: Total Conversion" by unleashing the Green Beam on major population centers like Washington, D.C. Growing annoyed by one of his untrustworthy lackeys, the Magnificent Molecule Man, the Mutant splits him into his component parts and leaves him to freeze in a Slippy-Slidey Ice World. In the game's bad ending, the Mutant wipes out the League of Good Guys and reduces the Earth to a wasteland, having trapped everyone and everything on it in the comic book world, which he rules over like a God.
- HorrorTown's The Haunted School event: Mr. Mumler Chameleon is given a much larger role than his novel counterpart. Mr. Chameleon is a photographer with a massive hatred for children who, in the past, banished the class of Bell Valley to the Grayworld. The trapped children would slowly go insane over decades of isolation unable to age or die, eventually becoming so broken that they would obey Mr. Chameleon's every command. When one of the kids Mr. Chameleon banished, Thalia, escapes, he starts chasing after her. While chasing after her, Mr. Chameleon plans on banishing another class of kids to Grayworld. Mr. Chameleon banishes the entire staff and two other students, planning to use his new position as principal to banish even more kids.
