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A Night in Terror Tower was originally published in January 1995 (Spine #27) and the series adaptation aired on February 26, 1996 (runtime: 44 minutes – 22 minutes each).
Centuries have a way of sanding down the sharp edges of the past, curbing terror, tragedy and the evils of man into palatable ghost stories that both educate and darkly entertain. Forgotten tombs become attractions and sites of mass slaughter turn into tourist hotspots, marketable places where families snap photos and listen to guides as they excitedly recount their hallowed location’s blood-soaked histories.
On the other hand, these are places that ask its patrons to consider what has been learned from humanity’s shared violent history. To place oneself in the shoes of some poor prisoner, soldier, civilian or saint while conjuring the fear, pain and sorrow of their hitherto forgotten plight. To feel it because it was there, because they were there. They existed. They died. And now, lifetimes later, we vacation.
A Night in Terror Tower finds the Goosebumps series in such a place, reverberating with the unjust echoes of the tortured and the damned. While embodying the silly, the spooky and the fun that the books are known for, it asks its characters to feel something deeper and more terrifying, internalizing the weight of the loneliness and crushing fear that accompanies the cruel grip of fate.
Following two vacationing siblings as they tour Terror Tower in London, the story finds its protagonists facing the ugly truths of the past making for a less than certain future. Its accompanying adaptation beautifully realizes the page onscreen, utilizing shadowy castle passages, elaborate costume design and engrossing locales to craft one of the best, most accurate page-to-screen adaptations in the show’s entire run. Together they represent one of Goosebumps creepiest, most exciting and thought-provoking tales, reminding every kid that embarks on a sight-seeing trip to somewhere disturbing, odd or strange to have a reverence for the place and its history, lest they become a part of it.
The Story
Sue and her little brother Eddie are on a bus tour in London while their parents are at a conference. After an endless line of boring museums, they’re finally heading somewhere exciting: London’s infamous Terror Tower. Still, as if the torture devices, jail cells and the strange man in black that seems to be after Sue and her brother weren’t scary enough, Sue can feel the pain and isolation of the place and its past victims seeping into her mind. If she and Eddie don’t figure out what’s going on soon, two fresh souls might just be added to Terror Tower’s doomed collection.
A Night in Terror Tower came out in January of 1995, several months before the television series initially premiered. Concerning two kids who get separated from their tour group on vacation, the story traverses old castles, the streets of London and even time itself. Playing with memories lost and gained, it’s one of R.L. Stine’s more disturbing tales, involving stories of murdered children and the cold, unfeeling lack of justice which powered the world’s checkered past.
The Adaptation
After a brief introduction by author R.L. Stine, the first of the two episodes opens with flare, thrusting the viewer into a medieval hellscape as whips lash and chained men scream. A masked executioner, not all that dissimilar from the one that adorns the cover of the book, sharpens a large axe menacingly as the whole scene is revealed to be a commercial for Terror Tower playing on a loop in an information booth in downtown London.
The book more traditionally opens with Sue’s narration, explaining that she and her brother Eddie, an expert pickpocket, are in London. The two are sight-seeing while their parents work and are headed for Terror Tower, a fortress originally built by the Romans that was eventually turned into a debtor’s prison of torture and pain. Their tour guide Mr. Starkes shows them various instruments of torture, small cells where prisoners waited for their beheadings and the tower cell at the top where a young prince and princess were once smothered to death in the night by order of a jealous and neurotic king.
On the screen Mr. Starkes maintains the dry British wit he exhibits on the page, pulling similar pranks on his tour group by telling them they’ll be tortured until they talk and playing up the pageantry of the Tower’s gruesome history. Still, when he tells the story of the children who were taken from their homes and locked away to be murdered, there is a gravity to his words that matches the text. While Sue’s internal struggle to grapple with the story and her feeling that the walls are closing in as she imagines the plight of the two children’s ghoulish demise is somewhat lost in translation, the show does its best to externalize those feelings through tweaks in dialogue, performance and claustrophobic screen composition.
The biggest difference onscreen is the fact that Sue and Eddie see specters of the past peppered about the tower, ghostly figures shouting warnings and phantom messages on the walls. It’s one such spiritual encounter that results in the two being separated from their group, as opposed to Sue’s daydreaming on the page. In both cases, they decide the group must have left without them and the two hurry back down the stairs. In the book they pass a cell from a previous scene and find a staircase that wasn’t there before, following it and encountering a mysterious man in black.
Appearing the same onscreen as he does on the page, the man is large, dressed in a black cape and fitted with a wide brimmed black hat that often obscures his face. In the book Sue spies him trailing the group and in the show Eddie mistakes him for a wax figure. In both versions the kids assume the man is a tower employee and ask him for help, receiving nothing but antagonism in return as he demands the children come with him. Wielding three white stones, the man mumbles strange words and the kids flee once more. The book and the screen match up closely throughout this sequence, following Sue and Eddie as they barricade themselves in the central torture chamber that they toured earlier.
While the page lingers for a moment on the kids’ fear of the place and their short-held belief that the puppets and prosthetics in the room are real, the screen breezes by and finds the man in black bursting through the door as the kids make their escape through a small opening in the wall. Both versions follow the kids and the mysterious man into the sewers beneath the tower, culminating with a horde of hungry rats on the page and swarming bats on the screen. While the rats are more grotesque, snapping and clawing at the kids’ legs and feet, both animals serve to distract the man as the two children make their escape up a ladder and back into the open air.
In the episode they see the bus pass them by and on the page the parking lot is empty, effectively reasserting that they have been left behind. Again the book and screen line up as they encounter a disbelieving guard (albeit a more antagonistic one onscreen) and nab a taxi back to town. Once they arrive Sue attempts to pay the driver but he scoffs at the offer. He exclaims that the money— odd coins that match neither British or American currency— isn’t real, forcing them into the hotel to find their parents. In the book the kids actually make it to their room, finding it empty after a maid lets them in, before heading to the front desk to inquire about their parents’ conference. The screen skips this step and follows the kids to the concierge at the front, where after a few questions the kids realize they can’t remember their last names, or their parents’ faces. In fact, they can’t remember anything beyond the day they’re currently experiencing.
The first episode concludes with this realization, picking up again as Sue and Eddie head to the restaurant to eat. The cab driver turns up soon after looking for his money and the kids flee, finding themselves in an old hallway on the page and the hotel kitchen in the show. In both cases, the man in black confronts them once more. He demands Eddie return what has been taken and, again in both versions, Eddie admits he stole the stones from him. Eddie agrees to return the stones if the man allows the children to go. Unfortunately, the man uses the stones to perform a spell and when Sue and Eddie awake from its influence, they are far from free.
The show diverges slightly here, simplifying Sue and Eddie’s experience once the spell is cast. On the page they wake up in a stone hallway lit by torches. They explore and discover a feast of laughing and chatting people, wearing strange tunics and animal skins, eating meats and fruits with their hands and speaking in accents difficult for them to understand. They’re chased out of the place and find that London has been replaced with dirt roads and livestock. Eddie disappears and Sue searches the fields, finally captured by the man in black after offering a woman her strange coins for shelter only to be betrayed due to the woman’s fear of the high executioner.
Onscreen, Sue wakes up without Eddie in the midst of the feast. She walks outside and the townspeople ridicule her, pointing at her strange outfit and eventually calling her out for the man in black to find. Sue similarly trusts a local woman and is subsequently turned in to the man in black despite paying the peasant woman gold sovereigns. Sue’s taken back to Terror Tower, now hundreds of years in the past, and reunited with Eddie who was captured earlier. The book takes time to show the misery and suffering of the people there, covered in filth and nursing deep wounds with muddy cloth as infants wail and the helpless weep, but the show moves quickly to the kids’ tower cell destination.
In the cell they meet Morgred, a sorcerer who reveals that he had cast a spell on them, that they are actually Princess Susannah and Prince Edward of York. He had sent them to the future with new memories in an effort to save them from their evil uncle who had already killed their parents, but it appears the good sorcerer failed in his mission. In the episode, he is imprisoned with them, demoralized and regretful as he is marched to his beheading alongside the children. In the book, he is visiting, saying he cannot help them because if he were to do so he would also be beheaded, leaving the kingdom without magic to protect its people.
In the book, Eddie reveals he had again stolen the three stones, but Morgred refuses to cast the spell this time, worried the king will find out. The children attempt to run and Morgred freezes them, leaving them to die with much regret but abandoning them all the same. Having once more stolen the stones from Morgred, Eddie casts the spell himself just as the high executioner opens the door to their cell. Sue and Eddie find themselves back in the twentieth century as the door opens and a different tour guide enters the room. The guide reveals an updated story: no one knows what happened to the children that disappeared from the tower the night of their intended execution centuries before. Morgred, going by Mr. Morgan, appears in the crowd and collects the two kids as their freshly installed parent, ready to grab a cheeseburger and begin a new life in the future world.
Onscreen, the ending has a little more panache as the three are brought to the chopping block. Despite telling him to be brave, Sue watches as Eddie loses composure and rushes the man in black, begging for his life. It’s here he steals the stones and tosses them to Morgred. Just as the executioner is about to grab Morgred, the magician casts his spell, dematerializing himself and the children. Again they wake up in the future tower as the tour guide, this time in the form of Mr. Starkes, ushers them back to the group. They see Morgred, wearing a purple scarf that matches his centuries old tunic, and he claims Sue and Eddie as his responsibility.
The episode finishes as they move to board their tour bus, asking Mr. Starkes to conclude the story he had been telling about the prince and princess. Like the book, he confirms that no one knows what happened to those kids, that they disappeared before they could be executed. Morgred smiles and notices one of his stones is missing, assuming Eddie is at it again. As the bus pulls away, however, the man in black steps forward, watching as he clutches one of the white stones.
Although a tad bit happier, with more credit being afforded to Morgred’s character and place in Sue and Eddie’s new lives, it seems the show couldn’t resist the temptation to point out the ever stalking shadows of the past and the indelible effect they have on one’s future.
Final Thoughts
A Night in Terror Tower explores humanity’s fascination with those tragic places where death outweighed life, wrong supplanted right and where distress baked into the framework as a cloud of soot might char permanently into stone were it to hang over it long enough. As with all great Goosebumps stories, Stine approaches such big ideas through the lens of adolescence, trusting kids to understand the terrors of the past through the thoughts, feelings and experiences of their peers and the kind of sight-seeing they themselves might well be doing on any number of family vacations.
Within that framework, the story turns the terror inward, crafting a narrative where the characters cannot even trust themselves, their very memories turning against them. From medieval horrors to psychological thrills akin to something like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), A Night in Terror Tower is a smorgasbord of engaging frights and fears, all the while sneakily commenting on the ever encroaching weight of society’s past transgressions as seen, or sometimes ignored, through modern eyes.
The adaptation adheres as closely to the text as it is able, crafting one of the best examples of the series while providing a wonderful window into the book’s strongest elements. The changes it makes are welcome ones and in some cases even enhance the characters and their relationships. Still, it is on the page where readers will find the most pathos and emotional resonation as the inner thoughts, doubts and introspection present there dwarfs most other entries in Goosebumps wide canon of terrifying tales.
For when traversing the horrors of history, it’s difficult not to be caught up in the dramatic intrigue and gory details. But, as Sue and Eddie found out, one must be careful to not forget that history is composed of people like you and me.
After all, no one wants to end up a ghost story— as entertaining as it may be to hear one.
