“Something told him the camera was hidden away for a reason…”
A group of kids is looking for something fun to do in the boring, sleepy town of Pitts Landing, where a popular refrain is often echoed: “Pitts Landing is the Pits.” Michael Warner, Greg Banks, Doug “Bird” Arthur, and Shari Walker, debate stopping by Grover’s comic book shop before wandering into an old deserted house, the “Coffman House,” which is rumored to be haunted. Consider the dark, Gothic description of this spooky old house: “At the top of the lawn, nearly hidden in the shadows of enormous old oak trees, sprawled a large ramshackle house. The house, anyone could see, had once been grand. It was gray shingled, three stories tall, with a wraparound screened porch, a sloping red roof, and tall chimneys on either end. But the broken windows on the second floor, the cracked, weather-stained shingles, the bare spots on the roof, and the shutters hanging loosely beside the dust-smeared windows were evidence of the house’s neglect” (6).
When they enter the house, the kids are wary of a creepy old “Boo Radley”-esque character named Spidey who is believed to live in the Coffman House. In the basement, Greg finds an unusual camera hidden away in Spidey’s presumed dwelling place. Greg takes a picture of Michael –but the photo doesn’t depict an accurate image of Michael. Instead, it strangely shows him falling through the floor. Moments later, Michael does actually fall through the floor and injure his ankle.
Over time, Greg starts to realize this camera just might be evil, showing horrible things in photos before they occur –his dad’s brand new blue taurus is totaled, his sibling Terry is shown to be terrified, a picture of Bird lying unconscious with his neck bent at an odd angle, and a picture of Shari –only she is nowhere to be found in the photograph. The photos show something terrible, and then it happens. Does this “evil” camera simply reveal the future? Or does it actually cause bad things to happen? When Greg rips up some oof the photographs, his friend Shari (who had vanished into thin air) suddenly reappears.
Greg has a troubling dream (hence the book’s cover art):
“It was about the camera. I was taking everyone’s picture. My whole family – Mom, Dad, and Terry. They were barbequing. In the backyard. I held up the camera. I kept saying, ‘Say cheese, say cheese,’ over and over. And when I looked through the viewfinder, they were smiling back at me –but… they were skeletons. All of them. Their skin was gone, and –and…” (69).
Fearful, Greg and his friends attempt to return the camera to its hiding place in the old, dark Coffman House, but they are suddenly confronted by Spidey, who reveals himself to be an old man. He was once a scientist named Fritz Fredericks. His lab partner created this camera but he cursed it when Spidey stole it. Spidey mentions how native people fear that photos steal their souls, and that this camera does something quite similar. Spidey then tries to take a photograph and keep the children in his basement forever, but a squabble ensues and a photograph is actually taken of Spidey instead, instantly killing him. Greg then returns the camera to its hiding place, hoping no one will ever find it. However, in the end, a pair of bullies who pop up from time to time in the book, Joey Ferris and Mickey Ward, manage to find the camera in the Coffman House and walk away with it…
Despite being an obvious rip-off of The Twilight Zone episode “A Most Unusual Camera,” Say Cheese and Die! is still a wonderfully macabre installment in the Goosebumps series. It beautifully blends old folkloric tales about curses and hauntings together with modern technology (like the evil camera) to create an uncanny urban folktale for the American suburbs. Say Cheese and Die! strikes me as one of the better stories in the original Goosebumps canon.
Stine, R.L. Goosebumps: Say Cheese And Die! Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1992.