A day out at the local amusement park sounds like some good old-fashioned summer fun: the rattle of the roller coaster cars whizzing by, the music of the carousel, the lights of the Ferris wheel, the smells of fried foods and cotton candy, the laughter and delighted screams of children as they run from one ride to the next. The amusement park is a kind of liminal space, a break from the stressors of everyday reality on the other side of the gates, a place intentionally designed for fun. But in Diane Hoh’s Funhouse (1990) and R.L. Stine’s Fear Park trilogy (The First Scream, The Loudest Scream, and The Last Scream; all 1996), that fun turns to terror and the screams are real. In addition to the horrifying events that take place at these parks, each must also reckon with a dark legacy.
The horrors in Funhouse and the Fear Park trilogy are no joke: in the opening chapter of Funhouse, the Devil’s Elbow roller coaster derails on its final hill, which “killed Dade Lewis, destroyed Sheree Buchanan’s face, and separated Joey Furman forever from his left leg” (1). In the Fear Park trilogy, a ride attendant is decapitated by the Ferris wheel and a rider is killed when an airborne swing breaks loose from the larger ride and sails him right into some power lines. Fear Park has a wildlife area in addition to the standard amusement park rides and one of the keepers is eaten by lions. People are literally dying at these amusement parks and while no one ever overtly argues that that’s just the cost of doing business, profits certainly factor into the parks’ responses to these tragedies, as they perform their due diligence in checking ride safety, say all of the right mournful things, and then reopen as quickly as possible to get people back through the gates and money coming back in.
While the owners of these parks dismiss these terrible events as regrettable accidents, there is (of course) nothing accidental about them. In both cases, someone is working hard behind the scenes to take down these parks and destroy their owners, because under the flashing lights and cotton candy fluff, they’re both hiding some dark secrets.
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In the Fear Park trilogy, it all goes back to the Fear family, as everything in Shadyside and on Fear Street seems to do, this time with Nicholas Fear and his son Robin, who live in the woods near Simon Fear’s burned down mansion. In 1935, a group of men from Shadyside come to speak with Nicholas Fear, asking him to donate some of his property to the town for an amusement park. As one of the men, Jack Bradley, pleads their case, telling Nicholas “We have received money to build a park … We would like to clear part of the woods and build the park there. It would mean so many jobs for people. And it would bring hundreds and hundreds of tourists to Shadyside” (The First Scream 18). Shadyside hasn’t bounced back from the stock market crash of 1929 and this park has the potential to get the town and its residents back on solid economic ground, with Bradley and his friends arguing that this park on Fear Street would be for the community’s greater good, and all they need to get going on it is a bit of Nicholas Fear’s land. However, Nicholas is unwilling to give it to them, exploding into a rage, attacking the men, and telling them that “The woods belong to the Fear family … They will always belong to the Fear family” (The First Scream 18-19, emphasis original). The men plead and attempt to reason with Nicholas and when he still tells them no, they go to the city and get the land through a kind of eminent domain claim, taking it without his permission.
While they are prepared to deal with Nicholas Fear’s anger and potential legal actions, they’re not prepared when it turns out that Nicholas Fear practices dark magic, able to conjure all kinds of malevolent power to punish those who have crossed him, all accompanied by swirls of purple smoke denoting the Fears’ influence. In The First Scream and the 1935 portion of Stine’s trilogy, this culminates in a bloodbath in the forest, as a group of teens hired to help chop up stumps and clear the land for the park fall under a spell that causes them to inexplicably and violently turn on each other, hacking one another to bits. As one of the girls, Meghan Fairwood, looks on in horror, “Kids chopped at one another. Swung and chopped. Swung and chopped. Until the tree stumps and the ground around them were soaked with dark blood. Arms lay strewn in the dirt. A head rolled to a stop against a blood-smeared rock” (The First Scream 106-107). The Fear Street Woods have once again become a place of violence and horror, with the Fears’ power and influence keeping outsiders at bay and reclaiming their land.
Despite this dark legacy, however, the Bradley family doesn’t give up so easily, as the obsession with building the park is passed from father to son over a couple of generations, until Fear Park actually opens to an excited public more than sixty years later, helmed by Jason Bradley, Jack’s grandson. The intervening sixty years have been plagued with setbacks and accidents, but the Bradleys apparently don’t know when to quit. For Jack Bradley—and by extension, his teenage daughter Deirdre—everything revolves around the park and its financial success. In a kind of Amityville Horror-style situation, Bradley has put every penny he has into the park, buying out investors with his own money when they got nervous, depleting his inheritance, and using every cent of Deirdre’s college fund on the park. If the park does not succeed, Jason and Deirdre Bradley will have nothing. So throughout all three books, no matter what happens, Jason Bradley holds a press conference, has the blood cleaned up, and reopens the park.
Fear Park’s relationship between the past and present is complicated and contentious. One of the most glaringly problematic examples of this is the Hatchet Show that is central to Fear Park’s entertainment, in which performers reenact the 1935 massacre in the woods, with teens hacking at one another, limbs flying everywhere, and buckets of fake blood. Despite the sensational and tasteless nature of the show, the crowd loves it, “standing, cheering, laughing, and applauding” (The First Scream 137-8), as the blood-soaked actors take their bows.
The other dangerous connection between Fear Park’s past and present is Robin Fear, who has mastered a spell of immortality and is still hanging around, trying to destroy the park at every opportunity.
Robin is a double agent as well, which invites the reader to think about how a particular story might be passed down, a persona crafted, or motivations articulated and justified. He has dragged Meghan Fairwood into immortality with him for company and tells her that he is trying to protect the Bradleys and Fear Park, working to counter his father’s curse. He starts dating Deirdre Bradley, but is actually planning to murder her. He convinces a group of local tough guys that he’ll help them get out of trouble, but his endgame is to cast a spell on them to kill them by making their bodies literally fall apart while he watches, enjoying every minute. But these guys have already been manipulated by Robin: when they tried to scare one of the workers, Robin cast a spell on the worker that ended with him being eaten by lions, and when the guys plant firecrackers in park’s mirror maze to cause some mischief, Robin casts a spell that blows the whole place up. He then identifies the guys as the ones responsible for the resulting death and destruction. Robin lies to everyone to keep the path clear for his vengeance, with no one really knowing who he is or what he’s capable of, an obliviousness that allows him to keep up his reign of terror for a remarkably long time. Finally Meghan catches on, warns Deirdre, and they trick him into reanimating the dead kids from 1935 at the Hatchet Show, who swarm upon and destroy Robin.
The dark legacy of Hoh’s Funhouse is much more realistic than that of the Fear Park trilogy, with no supernatural scares or spells required. It turns out that people who are out to make a buck and willing to exploit and abuse those they consider beneath them are just as terrifying—if not more so—than a cranky undead teenager. While the Bradleys were Robin’s main target in Fear Park, the amusement park in Funhouse is overseen by a board of directors, which slightly decentralizes the focus of the horror, though it does make it easier for the teens to identify a pattern, as kids who are killed or injured have parents on the board.
Like Fear Park, financial turmoil and uncertainty are central to Funhouse. The park is built upon troubling exploitation, which readers learn about through a series of entries in an old diary interspersed throughout the novel. The Boardwalk was originally owned by a man named Tully O’Hare and when the park fell on tough financial times, instead of helping him out with a business loan, the bank denied Tully’s request so that the current board of directors could exploit his vulnerable position and take the park from him, a devastating loss that ends with Tully committing suicide in the park’s Funhouse. Tully’s death leaves his pregnant wife Lila on her own to figure out how to carry on without him, without the means to support herself or their child. The board of directors once again have a solution to offer: one of them, who Lila refers to by his nickname of “Buddy,” tells her about another board member who is having trouble having children of his own, and would be happy to take her child and provide him or her with a life of luxury. Lila doesn’t want to give up her child, but sees no other choice, and when she gives birth, they drug her into unconsciousness, snatch the baby, and send her a big check. She tears the check up and kills herself, hoping to be reunited with Tully in the afterlife.
As the main character Tess Landers begins running through her peers to identify a list of possible culprits once things begin to go horribly awry at The Boardwalk, her main suspect is Doss Beacham, a boy whose father was recently kicked off the board as result of his alcoholism and financial insolvency, which Tess suspects might be a motive for revenge. Robert “Beak” Rapp is a practical joker who loves creating mayhem and Trudy Slaughter has a temper when things don’t go her way. Tess’s older brother Guy Joe Jr. finds Lila’s diary in the attic and through following the clues and putting the pieces of the shredded check back together, discovers that he is the lost O’Hare baby. (There’s no word on the potential implications of this for Tess’s parentage—did her parents have better luck conceiving later on? Is she adopted? Did they take her from some other down-on-her-luck woman too? Given that she barely survives in the novel’s final pages, it’s understandable that these aren’t the first questions on Tess’s mind, but they do seem like important ones). Filled with rage over the lies he has been told and grief for the birth parents he will never know, Guy Joe Jr. figures the best way to hurt the board of directors is through their children, as he derails the roller coaster, sabotages the funhouse, and gives them brownies dosed with rat poison, before attacking Tess in a planned murder-suicide.
There are some complex family relationships in Funhouse that take center stage with Guy Joe Jr.’s discovery, though things are pretty messy even before that, especially for the Landers family. Tess’s father is a widower who remarried, to a woman named Shelley, when Tess was thirteen. When Shelley and Guy Joe Sr. divorced four years later, Tess chose to live with her stepmother, despite her brother’s objections that their father is their “real parent” (3, emphasis original). Shelley isn’t around much—she’s on vacation in Italy with one of her girlfriends for the entirety of the novel—and while the children are very well provided for, Guy Joe Sr. is distant and disengaged, so there aren’t any great parental choices being offered. When Guy Joe Jr. tells Tess that he’s adopted, she tells him that he’s still her brother, a solidarity he refuses by calling her his “Little ex-sister” (155), severing the connections between them emotionally and linguistically, before he attempts to kill her. Even in her terror, Tess is able to empathize with Guy Joe Jr., thinking “Wouldn’t that be a horrible thing to learn when you were eighteen years old. Like … like your whole life wasn’t what you thought it was. It would be a terrible shock, wouldn’t it?” (152). Tess is able to save herself, tricking Guy Joe Jr. into falling from the funhouse, where he is injured and taken into custody, though he remains alert, aware, and (especially now that he’s solved the mystery of which board member is “Buddy”) committed to biding his time and getting his revenge.
While much of the ‘90s teen horror subgenre aligns readers with the teens who are experiencing a range of terrors and trying to put the pieces together to find answers, both the Fear Park trilogy and Funhouse are interspersed with the killer’s point of view. In Fear Park, Robin Fear’s perspective is a limited third-person point of view, one of many characters’ perceptions of events. This perspective allows readers to know more than the other characters in the books, particularly those who trust Robin, which provides readers with a big picture understanding that those characters lack. However, this limited third-person perspective also foregrounds the ways in which Robin’s arrogance and tunnel vision leave him blind to what’s really going on, including his thoughts about how Meghan is too stupid to ask questions and too obedient to disobey him, neither of which are true, as his downfall proves—though he never sees it coming. In Funhouse, the chapters alternate between Tess’s limited third-person point of view as she relates the horrific events at The Boardwalk and brief, first-person chapters from the perspective of the killer, who remains unidentified until the book’s final pages, as they read the diary, learn the truth, and work to process their feelings. While this first-person perspective does not justify or excuse Guy Joe Jr.’s actions, it does allow the reader to see his shock and horror, along with the methodical approach he takes in getting his revenge, foregrounding Guy Joe Jr.’s humanity and providing an opportunity for empathy and understanding that Fear Park never does.
At Fear Park and The Boardwalk, it’s not all fun and games. While these amusement parks may be places of enjoyment, that pleasure comes at a cost, one that has been absorbed into the very foundation and identity of the parks themselves, and has life-or-death ramifications. Both the Fear Park trilogy and Funhouse have a feeling of unfinished business, with no sense of what will happen next, if things will be different moving forward, if reparations will be made for the wrongs of the past. Or will it just be business as usual (though hopefully with a lower body count)? After all, the agitators who had dug up the dark secrets of these parks have been silenced, with Robin dead and Guy Joe Jr. institutionalized, so who’s going to complain now? Perhaps these dark legacies will be reckoned with, but it seems more likely that the narrative of fun and revelry will reassert itself and eclipse the horrors, so that the park owners can get people back in the gates and on the rides, an uncomplicated ethos of fun that will get the profits rolling in again.
Alissa Burger is an associate professor at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. She writes about horror, queer representation in literature and popular culture, graphic novels, and Stephen King. She loves yoga, cats, and cheese.
