Halloween may have been over for a spell, but true horror is timeless. One of the most well-known staples in a ’90s child’s Halloween is undoubtedly the day the very first episode of the original Goosebumps TV show aired, featuring a story about a tormented young girl and the Halloween mask she dons to avenge herself.
The Haunted Mask was the 11th book released in the original Goosebumps series, and the first to be set during Halloween. R.L. Stine’s gone on record to say the book had two major sources of inspiration: a Halloween from his childhood when he was forced to wear a duck costume, and an incident when his son couldn’t take off a Frankenstein’s monster mask. Being the first one to gain a filmed adaption, The Haunted Mask later received two different direct sequels, a reboot, and a graphic novel adaption by artist Maddi Gonzales.
Among the original Goosebumps books, The Haunted Mask boasts one of its most iconic covers by Tim Jacobus. A young girl holding up a green-skinned, fanged face with golden eyes and drooling teeth completely obscuring her head.
In the original Haunted Mask, we’re introduced to Carly-Beth Caldwell a girl who’s scared by pretty much everything. Even her best friend Sabrina can’t help but giggle at how easily frightened Carly-Beth is. Relentlessly picked on by bullies Steve and Chuck and her own little brother, Carly-Beth is desperate for payback on her tormentors.
Come Halloween, Carly-Beth searches for a truly scary costume to terrorize her bullies. Searching around a new party store, she finds a backroom filled with grotesque masks. Reluctantly, the Shopkeeper allows Carly-Beth to purchase a hideous green mask. It works like a charm, giving Carly-Beth the confidence to scare her brother and Steve and Chuck out of their wits. For the first time in her life, Carly-Beth has won.
And then she realizes she can’t get the mask off.
Returning to the party store, Carly-Beth is told the mask isn’t a mask. It’s a living, human face, as are all the masks in the backroom. The Shopkeeper reveals these were all once beautiful, artificial faces which became twisted and malformed. If they’re put on and taken off three times, by the third time the mask will bond with a person’s body and become their new face. The only way they can be removed is with a “symbol of love.”
Carly-Beth is one of the most endearingly tortured and pathetic of Stine’s slew of “loser” protagonists, but not to the point she becomes insufferable or frustrating compared to the likes of Evan Ross. You can’t say she’s done anything to deserve the bullying she experiences. Accordingly, you want her to get revenge on Steve and Chuck for how horrid they are. Even as she finds herself slowly losing her personality in the depths of the mask, Carly-Beth retains enough humanity to stay sympathetic.
The Haunted Mask likewise comes across as a tragic villain, despite not exerting any agency of its own. It and its brethren are only failed experiments who simply want to belong to others. What makes their situation even sadder is the fact that while they want to be wanted, it’s the power of love itself that repels them.
The symbol of love that’s used to dispel the Haunted Mask comes in the form of a sculpture Mrs. Caldwell has made in the likeness of her daughter’s head. Carly-Beth is initially unnerved by her mother’s artwork, and so uses it in her scares on Halloween night. The sculpture appears to act as a focus point for Carly-Beth’s subconscious when it suddenly calls out to Steve and Chuck for help, after the Haunted Mask has bonded to her head. It’s especially unnerving in the TV show’s adaption thanks to the uncanny valley effect, making it rather ironic that this is the symbol of love needed to save Carly-Beth’s humanity.
The Haunted Mask II changes perspectives, shifting the narrative over to Steve Boswell. Steve and his best friend Chuck were Carly-Beth’s primary tormentors up until she terrorized them with her creepy Halloween mask. He’s desperate for a chance to scare her like the old days, only Carly-Beth’ is no longer so easily frightened. To further add to his misery, Steve’s forced to coach a bunch of rowdy little kids on an afterschool soccer team as punishment for a prank.
Looking to kill two birds with one stone, Steve breaks into the old party store to find a mask of his own to terrify Carly-Beth and the soccer kids. The mask he takes resembles a grotesque old man, which soon melds with Steve’s face and turns him into an old man. Steve is left hoping to have his cake and eat it too when he struggles to regain his face while still hoping to frighten the kids as revenge. In rather amusing irony, Steve’s soccer team aren’t frightened of him in the slightest because they genuinely think he is an old man. After being so unrepentantly awful to him, Steve’s shocked by how kind and considerate these brats are acting to a “senior citizen.”
The Haunted Mask had the distinction of being the first Goosebumps book to be adapted for TV as an hour-long special. Starring Kathryn Long as Carly-Beth, the episode remains rather faithful to the book while trimming some excess, like a couple of chapters set during a science fair. Some backstory is hinted about the Shopkeeper, who implies that his own face is in fact a slowly degrading mask hiding something far worse underneath. The episode stands out as far more somber and serious compared to the campiness of later Goosebumps episodes.
Kathryn Long is the real standout in the episode as Carly-Beth. She perfectly encapsulates just how frustrated and exhausted Carly-Beth has become from years of humiliation and self-loathing. After her brother freaks her out with the duck costume their mother made for her, Carly-Beth has a tearful breakdown while ripping the costume apart and sobbing her eyes out. Furthermore, when Carly-Beth enacts her revenge on Steve and Chuck with the Haunted Mask, her voice briefly gains dominance over the Mask’s screech while she screams about all the horrible things her bullies have done to her.
The episode goes the path of making the Haunted Mask and the rest of the Unloved a bit more realistic in their ugliness. They come closer to the idea of warped human faces, and wouldn’t be that out of place in perhaps a Hellraiser entry. When the rest of the masks come to life and follow after Carly-Beth into the graveyard, they painfully beg the young girl to stay with them and want them.
The Haunted Mask II would be adapted some time later into a two-part episode, but only took the basic idea of “Steve gaining a mask” before doing its own thing. The episode feels more like a genuine sequel to the original book by making the Haunted Mask the main villain. Freeing itself from the place Carly-Beth buried it, the Haunted Mask latches itself onto the Shopkeeper just as he’s burning the rest of the Unloved. Luring Steve and Chuck to the party store, it watches as Steve finds the old man mask. Once the mask bonds to Steve, the Haunted Mask reveals itself and forces Steve to do its bidding. The Haunted Mask wants Carly-Beth back as its host, but can’t get near her due to the sculpture Mrs. Caldwell made still acting as a “symbol of love.”
What makes the episode so noteworthy is the agency it gives the Haunted Mask, turning it from a prop into an actual antagonist. Its goals are clearly expressed as a twisted obsession with its former owner, willing to do anything and use anyone if it means it gets Carly-Beth again. Steve is made more sympathetic; the soccer kids are removed and he’s turned into a pawn of the actual villain. The episode highlights how much pain Steve’s in thanks to the old man mask forcibly changing his body, alongside the Haunted Mask torturing him into submission. Likewise, Carly-Beth is made crucial to the plot again throughout both halves when Chuck tells her and Sabrina about Steve acting weird due to his mask.
There were plans for a third Haunted Mask book that would’ve kickstarted the Goosebumps Gold line before all the legal trouble between Parachute Press and Scholastic. Called The Haunted Mask Lives, all that’s definitively known is the cover artwork Tim Jacobus posted on his personal website. For years, the book was erroneously listed on sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble despite never being released. Some sites claimed the book would’ve featured the Shopkeeper targeting Carly-Beth for unexplained reasons.
Tim Jacobus shared rough sketches of the cover art for The Art Of Goosebumps, including a mock-up of what appeared to be Carly-Beth tearing her face off her skull.
Years later, a new Haunted Mask story was indeed released as part of Goosebumps HorrorLand. Scream of the Haunted Mask was a requel which ignored The Haunted Mask II, bringing Carly-Beth Caldwell back as the protagonist. She’s been keeping the Haunted Mask under lock and key, but the mask won’t easily rest. Carly-Beth can hear its scream in her mind, and she’s afraid it might compel her to wear it again.
Scream of the Haunted Mask does some soft rebooting on the first book by implying the Haunted Mask is much older than Carly-Beth assumed. She learns from the Shopkeeper that the mask had a previous owner, and was responsible for their death. The wording of this is kind of vague, as it implies the Shopkeeper didn’t create the Haunted Mask after all. Nevertheless, Carly-Beth realizes she’s now in danger from both the Haunted Mask and the ghost of its previous wearer with a mystery set up on who that person is.
And this is all before Carly-Beth and Sabrina are summoned to HorrorLand theme park alongside several other haunted kids like Billy Deep from the Deep Trouble books.
Unfortunately, Stine doesn’t really make the Haunted Mask as much of a compelling villain this time around. The HorrorLand books zigzag between it having an agenda and the mask still being a sentient prop.
Goosebumps Wanted: The Haunted Mask is as of now the last appearance of the mask in the Goosebumps. With a full continuity reboot, the Haunted Mask is found inside an attic closet by a girl named Lu-Ann. Lu-Ann dons the mask to liven up a Halloween party she really doesn’t want to attend and quickly goes on a rampage. The book features a separate story about Lu-Ann’s best friend, Devin, forced to spend the Halloween weekend at a haunted pumpkin farm. The stories collide when the rampaging Lu-Ann suddenly appears at the pumpkin farm just as Devin’s about to be killed by the mysterious Grave-Master.
The Haunted Mask would return as a minor background villain in the Goosebumps feature film and as a character in the Goosebumps HorrorTown game alongside Carly-Beth Caldwell. The 2023 Goosebumps TV show partially adapted the Haunted Mask into an episode. Isabella, a timid girl who hides behind the persona of a vicious Internet troll to vent her frustrations, discovers a weird mask in the house of the late Harold Biddle. The more Isabella wears the mask, the more it influences her behavior until it finally takes over and turns her into a monster.
The 2023 show received criticism for the way it portrayed the Haunted Mask, specifically its design being practically unrecognizable to the mask from the books and previous show. The 2023 Haunted Mask starts off as a blank, doll-like mask Isabella straps to her head. The more it’s worn, the more it turns monstrous, taking on the visage of a rat-like troll with stringy hair. The most common complaint is that the show tried to make it more “serious” in keeping with the whole Riverdale-esque teen horror drama vibe.
The most recent adaptation is a Goosebumps Graphix illustrated edition drawn by artist Maddi Gonzales. The graphic novel is a largely faithful interpretation for the original book that slightly updates the setting from the 1990s. It removes the rule that the mask will bond after it’s put on three times. Carly-Beth is able to remove it once, only for it to merge with her head the second time she wears it.
Maddi Gonzales’ depictions of the Unloved contain elements from all three previous interpretations – the original books, the card art, and the TV show. They match the vibe described in Stine’s original books while harkening to the TV show’s masks with the bright coloring of Wayne Murray’s cards. One of the most striking differences is a sequence within Carly-Beth’s mind as she’s given a choice between her own face and the Haunted Mask. Before she chooses, her head is devoid of facial features.
Time will tell if the future has anything in store for the Haunted Mask’s story. If Slappy the Dummy can get a million books, anything’s possible.