Thirty-one years ago this week, Fox launched Goosebumps in prime time with a two-part Halloween special, and television for kids was never quite the same. The special was “The Haunted Mask,” adapted from R. L. Stine’s 1993 book, and it remains the episode the whole franchise is still measured against. It first aired on October 27, 1995, which made Tuesday its 31st anniversary.
Kathryn Long stars as Carly Beth Caldwell, a girl so easily scared that her classmates treat it as a sport. Determined to turn the tables one Halloween, she finds a mask in a strange novelty shop that is horrifyingly lifelike. The shopkeeper warns her off it, but she takes it anyway. Then, partway through the night, the mask stops being something she is wearing. It tightens, it changes her voice, and it will not come off, because it is becoming her face. The only way back is the one thing that can break its hold: a symbol of love, the plaster sculpture of her head that her mother made.
It played like a genuine event. The premiere was watched in 7.9 million American households, and in Canada, where it was filmed, it became the highest-rated episode in YTV’s history to that point, drawing nearly three million viewers. Long’s performance earned a Gemini Award nomination, and when the special reached VHS the following March, it sold more than 2.5 million copies and became the only Goosebumps tape on Billboard’s year-end best-sellers list.
The series ran four seasons and dozens of episodes, but “The Haunted Mask” is the one that gets rewatched every October, its snarling green face now as much a Halloween fixture as any slasher’s. Fittingly, for a mask that would not leave, it is in no hurry to be forgotten.