How About That Thing?

Not going to lie, I’m kind of surprised I haven’t talked more about Goosebumps books on here. Even if plenty of other people have talked about the books and the TV show alike, I still feel like there’s plenty of material that could be covered here. It isn’t even like the first, and until this article, the only Goosebumps article I wrote did poorly or anything.

Well, whatever my reason is for taking so long, it’s spooky season, and I figured what better time to talk about another Goosebumps novella than now. And this go-around, we’re talking about one I actually LIKED. One that I remember reading, and thinking: “Oh yeah, I’m definitely glad I stuck with this series after that stupid piano school bullshit.” Except obviously, nine-year-old me didn’t say bullshit… But you get the idea. Today, we’re talking about this one.

Ah yes, Say Cheese and Die. One of my personal favorites. So much so, in fact, that I even owned the T-shirt at one point.

The gimmick of this book is that the main character and his friends discover a polaroid camera hidden away in a condemned building. Somehow, it still works, and it happens to be loaded up with plenty of photo stock. Perfect for snapping photos!

Unfortunately, the more photos that are taken, the grimmer the main character’s life becomes. That’s because instead of taking proper photos, this camera gives glances into the future. And thanks to “black magic” (which we’ll get to in a minute), its predictions are always bad. To make matters even worse, said predictions always come true.

For example, the main character takes a photo of his dad’s brand new car. When the photo comes out, he takes a look at it, and finds that instead of the photo he took, it’s a photo of a brutal car accident.

He takes a photo of one of his friends, only to find that the photo is of the tree she was standing in front of instead. Later that day, the 90s equivalent of an amber alert goes off, letting everybody know the girl has gone missing!

And just in case all of this weren’t bad enough, it turns out that the camera is only PART of the equation. Along with the camera, a man the kids have nicknamed Spidy is after them. Towards the end of the book, he reveals that he and his lab partner built the camera. He says he INVENTED the camera… But I’m pretty sure polaroid cameras existed well before they went to work on this thing. Maybe it was a new design?

Well, either way, Spidy tells the kids that he let his ego get the better of him, and he claimed he built the camera himself. His lab partner, being thoroughly pissed off at this, delves into his knowledge of the dark arts, and curses the camera with the power of black magic. How, exactly, the book doesn’t go into detail. However, knowing what I know about the dark arts, I’m pretty sure a pentagram, a goat, and Sam Raimi were all involved. Either way, that’s how we end up with the haunted camera that’s been reeking havoc throughout the story.

So the thought occurs to me after hearing all this: why hasn’t anybody tried destroying the camera? Hiding it is definitely a good SHORT TERM solution, but you just know someone else is going to pick that camera up later on and bring misfortune to everybody around them. You’re obviously not going to live forever, so standing guard isn’t a good long term solution, either. Unless the black magic that curses the camera somehow protects it from being destroyed (which might be a possibility for all I remember), Just take a god damn sledgehammer to the thing!

And yes, I know if Spidy destroyed the camera in the first place, there wouldn’t be a story. Not necessarily, anyway. I mean you COULD tell the story of how the camera got cursed, and how Spidy came to REALIZE it was cursed, and THEN have him destroy it… But I guess that wouldn’t make for a good kid’s book if the protagonists were adults, right? I don’t know, I’m just spitballing at this point.

This one little detail not withstanding, though, I still ended up liking this book very much. Partly because it was one of the better ideas R.L. Stine came up with for a horror story… But also because I’ve been fascinated with cameras for as long as I can remember..

Yeah, I know, a guy with vision problems has a thing for a visual medium like photography. Hey, why not? If a deaf guy could compose multiple symphonies…

But yes, photography has always been something I’ve had an on-again-off-again fascination with photography. I still wonder to this day if that’s because photography runs in my family, or if it’s more along the lines of worshipping my grandpa and wanting to be like him when I grew up. After all, that camera of his seemed like it was practically glued to his hand at one point, he took so many photos.

Interestingly enough, I ended up marrying in to a family that was just as interested, if not more so, in photography. My grandpa-in-law even has some trophies from competitions he submitted to through the 1960s. My brother-in-law has also expressed interest in photography as well… I think?

All of this being in my background is probably why I consider it kind of a shame when I see what happened to photography in the modern age. True, you still see professionals lug around Nycon, or canon, or Sony brand cameras, but the vast majority of people nowadays just use their phones. And if Instagram is anything to go by, they almost never take photos of anything meaningful. I mean maybe a picture of the family means more to them than it would to a stranger like me, and I can respect stuff like that… But then there’s the endless stream of selfies for Instagram, or pictures of their dinner for X, and so on.

To me, photography is one of those things that felt like it was an artform at one point. Nowadays, any dipshit with an Android, or an iPhone can take a photo of a chair, put it through a black and white filter, and call themselves a photographer.

I’m not going to sit here and talk about how I took artistic and meaningful photos like some art house loser in a black turtleneck and a strong sense of unwarranted self importance. A lot of the photos I took were either family photos, photos of my pets, and for a while, photos of plastic army men in silly or compromising positions and situations for an animatic series I was doing on YouTube at the time. But even back then, I felt like photography took some degree of talent.

I still remember my first digital camera: a Samsung Digimax A503 I got as a bit of an early birthday present. Even by 2006 standards, I’m pretty sure that bad boy was obsolete. In a day and age where everything had lithium batteries that could be easily recharged, this thing took standard double-A batteries. But when I received that camera, I was still felt like I’d truly reached adulthood. It was my first digital camera, and I took many photos with it. Then I exchanged it for a Sanyo E1090 that, at the time at least, was more up to date, but still, that was MY camera.

I would collect other digital cameras over the years. Mostly Canon cameras, and whatever the hell model my mom used to use before she too decided her Google Pixel would suffice. I still whip them out and take photos every once and a while, too. Hell, if I had the money for it, I’d probably add to my collection. That’s how much I love cameras.

And it’s right about here I realize I’ve gone WAY off topic. Sorry about that.

So yeah, my love for this story probably comes from my fascination with cameras and photography. Something that you could totally make a story about in 1990-whatever… But I don’t know if you could today. Like I said above, ninety-nine percent of society just use their phones now. Hell, the concept of physical copies is practically obsolete nowadays as well.

The only way I think you could make this work in the modern day is if you gave the main character a sort of retro hipster aspect to their character. On top of liking photography, they also have a thing for obsolete technology. It could work… But you run the risk of leaning too far into the hipster dynamic, and you end up with one of those douchebags who thinks vinyl is cool, and fedoras are fashionable.

“Didn’t you used to have a fedora in your college years?”

Shut up, random voice in my head that refuses to let me have nice things.

Anyway, the concept might be showing its age, but I still consider it one of the better Goosebumps books ever written. I’d say it’s worth a read, if you ever find a copy.