In horror, there’s a long and bloody history of people who are told not to go somewhere and go there anyway, with disastrous results. An abandoned asylum where people have heard screams in the night? The ruins of an old school, rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of former students? A summer camp where a whole bunch of kids were slaughtered a few years back? That creepy haunted house just down the street? All good places to stay away from. But of course, the siren song of mystery, thrill seeking, and a clandestine place to party/drink/have sex away from the prying eyes of adults is just too strong and our horror heroes and heroines invariably end up right where they’re not supposed to be. In Diane Hoh’s Captives (1995), Sinclair Smith’s Double Date (1996), and R.L. Stine’s Trapped (1997), ‘90s teen horror authors get in on this time-honored tradition, with predictably terrifying results.
The allure of the abandoned, off-limits space has particular resonance in teen horror. After all, with the vast majority of these protagonists living at home, they don’t really have a ton of privacy, especially when they want to have fun that wouldn’t be parentally-approved. Every now and then, parents go out for the night or away for the weekend, but other than that, if these teens are looking to escape from prying eyes and adult supervision, the top options seem to be cars, graveyards, or some dark clearing in the woods (all of which have their own set of horrific possibilities). With that in mind, abandoned houses, haunted hotels, and creepy tunnels start to seem a little more appealing. Well, not really … but you work with what you’ve got.
In Hoh’s Captives (Nightmare Hall #25), the site of horror is—unsurprisingly—Salem University’s Nightingale Hall, better known as Nightmare Hall. While Nightingale Hall is an active off-campus dorm, Captives takes place during summer break,the dorm is empty, and the house mother has gone on a little vacation before the students return for the fall semester. Four friends—Lynne, Daisy, Toni, and Molloy—are headed to campus in July to take part in a summer math program. They each have different motivations for doing so: Daisy’s acceptance at Salem U for the fall is conditional on her successful completion of the math program, and as the first in her family to go to college, going to Salem is her ticket to a better life. Lynne’s parents have pressured her into taking the math class and bribed her to do so with a new car. Molloy is going because her boyfriend Ernie is already there and this will give them a chance to spend some time together, much to the chagrin of her disapproving parents, while Toni is great at math and just taking the class because her friends are. There’s a terrible thunderstorm with flash flooding and the young women end up washed off the road and stranded, on the very same night that someone murders the campus psychologist Dr. Leo, and whether the motivation is getting out of the rain or evading police capture, they all end up in deserted Nightmare Hall.
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Molloy has heard the rumors about Nightmare Hall from Ernie, but there’s really nowhere else for them to go, so the young women break in and make themselves at home. Nightmare Hall is the setting for a wide range of horrors throughout Hoh’s series and in Captives it becomes a kind of locked room mystery, as their tormenter locks the girls in and stalks them through a maze of rooms that they can’t see particularly well in the dark, since the power is out. There’s a bit of a “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” vibe as they riffle through the house, pulling clothes from the house mother’s dresser and from trunks in the attic to find something dry to wear. The phone doesn’t work, but at least they’re out of the storm and ready to hunker in and wait it out, but when Lynne goes to get wood so they can start a fire, she doesn’t come back. This initial mystery sets the tone for the rest of the book, as the mysterious murderer picks the girls off one by one: they find Lynne’s unconscious body shoved into a trunk in attic, Toni gets pushed out a second floor window, and Daisy is strangled when she attempts to get back to the car. A police officer is sent to check out the house and ends up whacked on the head and skewered through the chest with some attic brick-a-brack. Molloy is the most resourceful of the group, tying a rope across the main stairwell so that their attacker will trip if he comes that way and breaking glass on the thresholds to the different doorways into the kitchen where she has taken refuge so that she’ll be sure to hear him coming and hopefully slow him down if he has taken his shoes off for stealthy movement. She knocks him unconscious and ties him up and when he escapes, she comes up with a Plan B, throwing boiling water in his face because luckily, Nightmare Hall has a gas stove and Molloy was making a cup of tea (as you do when someone is trying to murder you in a creepy, empty house).
In Smith’s Double Date, Tracy and her boyfriend Kyle go on a double date with Travis and Christie. There are some complicated dynamics in this foursome: in middle school, Tracy publicly humiliated Travis when she told the popular girls “I’d die before I’d go out with Travis” (5), which he overhears. Shortly after this, Travis disappears and no one sees him again for several years (he’s intentionally cagey about where he’s been, but the top contenders seem to that he and his brother moved to a different town when his brother got a good job there or that Travis has been in a juvenile detention facility after violently attacking some guy). The group dynamic is further complicated by the fact that Tracy has a crush on Travis (and always has), while she’s simultaneously growing disenchanted with the predictability of her relationship with Kyle, though we shouldn’t feel too bad for Kyle either, who is constantly flirting with Christie. This all gets even weirder when it turns out that Christie isn’t Travis’s girlfriend but is actually his cousin, who he invited along on the date in an attempt to make Tracy jealous.
Travis is also a real practical joker, but his “jokes” include things like pretending to stab people, shoplifting candy bars from a mini mart, and using a recording to make Tracy think someone is shooting at them. He’s a laugh a minute, this guy. The main event of their double date, however, is when Travis takes them to an abandoned hotel that he says his brother bought and plans to turn into a ski lodge. After they break in—which really should be a red flag to the “my brother owns this place and it’s totally cool for us to be here” story—he tells them about how his great great grandfather used to work at the hotel, went crazy when the owner announced he was shutting it down, and killed a whole bunch of guests, a story he backs up with a handful of old news clippings. The old hotel is now (obviously) haunted, but ghosts won’t get in the way of the old hotel being renovated into a killer ski lodge. It’s a spooky story … but a lot of it isn’t actually true. While there had been murders at the hotel, Travis appropriated this dark history for his own purposes, having fake newspaper articles printed up to establish a family connection. There may or may not be ghosts; there were murders like the ones Travis described, it’s just that they weren’t committed by his great great grandfather. Travis’s brother definitely doesn’t own the hotel, though his construction company is going to be working on fixing it up for the actual new owner, which is how Travis heard about it in the first place. The whole night was a ploy so that Travis could scare Tracy to get back at her for being mean to him in middle school, but he actually likes her and she actually likes him and he decides to call the whole thing off … except now they’re stuck at the hotel because there’s a sudden blizzard that wasn’t in any of the weather forecasts, their Jeep has been disabled, and they’re sharing the hotel with a murderer who escaped from prison and is hiding out upstairs.
Both Captives and Double Date include sections from the point of view of the murderers, Captives with whole chapters in first-person perspective that give us insight into the murderer’s thought processes and rationalizations, and Double Date with brief, third-person asides that provide a glimpse of where he is, what he’s doing, and what he’s got planned. Like the use of the killer’s point of view in the slasher film tradition, these asides take us outside the perspective of the protagonists, align us with the predatory movements of these killers, and build suspense, as we know more about the danger these characters are in than they do themselves.
In Double Date, the killer is named Laughing Bill and he separates the four teens from one another, stalking and attacking them. Once he has Travis, Kyle, and Christie immobilized, he decides his best option is to take Tracy as a hostage, shave her head, and head for the Canadian border (it’s not a great plan). Tracy outwits Laughing Bill to escape this kidnapping plot, and when he attacks her again and it seems like she might not be tough enough to take him, some ghostly presence chokes him and “he staggered about as if trying to run from an invisible tormenter, knocking over chairs and making horrible gurgling sounds” (162). This presence is both a threatening force and apparently a heroic murder-murdering machine. Or perhaps there are multiple ghosts working at cross purposes. Tracy’s theory is that maybe “the ghost helped save us. I wonder if he was trying to make amends for what he did years ago” (168), though Kyle remains unconvinced that there’s a ghost at all, arguing that Laughing Bill just happened to choke to death while threatening Tracy.
Finally, Stine’s Fear Street book Trapped is a nightmarish take on The Breakfast Club, with five very different high school students stuck together for a Saturday detention. Elaine is a good girl who is only there because she forgot her trigonometry homework, and conscientious objector Jerry is there because he refused to dissect a frog in biology class. The other three students—Max, Bo, and Darlene—are a bit tougher. Max tagged a school bus and Darlene cut a bunch of classes. Bo’s infraction remains pretty undefined, but in the opening chapters, he sets a textbook on fire and throws a switchblade at the principal, so there are lots of possibilities. As soon as Principal Savage’s back is turned, mayhem ensues, as the kids head down the cafeteria for snacks and explore the dark, deserted school. When they duck into the auditorium to evade Principal Savage, Elaine accidentally discovers a series of tunnels beneath the school when she falls through a rotted hatch to the cement floor far below.
(Trapped is the last book of Stine’s core Fear Street series and there are a couple standout moments that are pretty representative of the series as a whole. When Bo fakes being stabbed in the kitchen while they’re getting snacks and asks Elaine “you really thought there was some psycho running around, cutting people up?”, her deadpan response is “this is Shadyside” [25]. And later, as they attempt to make sense of the horrifying red mist that’s murdering them one by one, Bo candidly wonders “what’s that all about?” [107], which feels like a question that could be asked in literally any Fear Street book and be equally relevant. Trapped also has what may be the oddest cover tagline of the whole series, with “You’re invited … to die.” Seems pretty easy to RSVP a hard no to that one.)
The tunnels are apparently legendary and referred to in local lore as the Labyrinth, with Bo and Max having heard stories of them from their friends. As Bo explains, “back in the fifties, they built these tunnels as a bomb shelter. Supposedly they run for miles. The plan was to connect the whole town in case we were nuked. But no one ever needed the shelter. So this place became Party Central. Shadyside kids would come down here and throw major parties” (42). Though the stories live on, the tunnels themselves were sealed off years ago when there was some mysterious tragedy and “a lot of kids died” (43). As the five teens set off to explore the tunnels, it seems more and more like sealing them off was a good idea: the tunnels really are labyrinthine, a tangle of complicated branchings in which the students quickly become disoriented and lost. There are a LOT of rats. The leftover graffiti from the Labyrinth’s erstwhile party days feels like an unsettling time capsule. Parts of the tunnel are flooded and nearly impassable. And that’s all before the killer red mist shows up.
The teens find an oddly bricked up section of wall that doesn’t match the rest of the tunnel and when they start poking around at it, the wall explodes outward, with a red mist coalescing in the tunnel in front of them, as the particles “began to gather into one dense cloud … The mist didn’t clear. In fact it seemed to intensify around Max. Thickening. Growing” (65). It engulfs Max, lifts him off his feet, and proceeds to break his bones before swirling off down the tunnel, taking screaming Max along with it. This red mist is indefinable but intense, literally destroying the bodies of those it consumes. The red mist’s attacks are horrifying, impossible to defend against, and not an easy way to go. While Bo pursues the mist to try to save Max, Darlene and Jerry panic and do their best to run as quickly as possible back to the exit (except that they’re really lost and have no idea which direction that is, which leaves them running in hysterical circles through gross, dark tunnels while screaming at each other). Elaine doesn’t want to leave Bo behind, but Darlene and Jerry have the only torch, so she has to follow them or risk being left behind in the pitch dark. Bo finds the other three and tells them of Max’s grim fate and by sheer dumb luck, they find their way to the ladder that will take them back to good old Shadyside High. There’s a glimmer of hope until the red mist shows up and claims Jerry as “Jerry’s face twisted into a terrible shape, full of pain and fear … [Elaine] winced as Jerry’s legs bent behind him and slammed into his back with horrifying force. She heard his spine shatter. Jerry’s shoes struck the back of his head with a hollow clunk. His screams stopped” (94). As they are reeling from second horror, the ladder collapses and Bo, Elaine, and Darlene find themselves trapped once more in the maze of tunnels, with no idea of where they might be able to find another exit.
As they head further into the tunnels, this time passing through the bricked up section from which the red mist emerged, Bo, Elaine, and Darlene find themselves getting closer to the truth. Behind the bricked up wall is a decades-old cave in and in the cavern within, they discover six skeletons, the remains of kids who were trapped there after that section of the tunnel collapsed. The six students wrote their names on the wall, their own testament to their existence, and near these names Bo, Elaine, and Darlene find a cryptic message: “Scott Savage Knows” (118). It turns out Principal Savage was once a bad choice-making, party-loving teenager just like them, and was in the Labyrinth with his friends the fateful night of the collapse, though he was one other side of the structural failure chasing runaway beer bottles. He assumed his friends were killed in the collapse and ran away, but instead of just telling someone what happened, he snuck back the next night, took a play out of the Edgar Allan Poe handbook, and bricked up that section of the tunnel, so no one would know they had been there and he wouldn’t get in trouble. Except that his friends were still alive and managed to tunnel out of the cave-in, only to find their path forward completely bricked up. They died, consumed with rage and betrayal, and collectively transformed into the killer red mist. When Principal Savage comes down to save the kids—because of course he has known about the tunnels all along and is able to navigate them with no trouble—and comes face-to-face with the mist, Elaine sees the truth as the particles coalesce into “Faces. Twisted and full of rage. Their mouths were dark pits—open in screams that no one would hear. Their eyes were black and empty. All around them, the mist spun like a lethal web … The red mist didn’t kill those six kids. The red mist was the six kids” (141, emphasis original), transformed by their rage and desire for revenge. The red mist attacks Principal Savage, though once he is destroyed, the mist is satisfied and dissipates for good.
Bo and Elaine are the only survivors, as Darlene dies attempting to flee the cavern pursued by animated skeletons, though her end is reduced to a vague “blood-curdling scream” (127) and Bo’s pronouncement that “she’s gone” (132) when he reunites with Elaine. While Darlene isn’t a particularly heroic character—she nearly knocks Elaine down in an attempt to steal her torch and later, when escape is in sight, shoves past Elaine to get up the ladder first, entirely willing to sacrifice the other girl to save herself—it feels like she deserves a better end.. She was probably consumed by the red mist and after seeing what happened to Max and Jerry, we know what that looks like, but between her death being unseen and Bo’s curt dismissal of any discussion in the aftermath, Darlene’s loss is shunted to the margins and comes across feeling less important or meaningful than those of Max, Jerry, and even Principal Savage.
In Captives, Double Date, and Trapped, characters go where they’re not supposed to go and stumble upon a range of horrors. In Captives and Double Date, the violence is grounded in the real world. In Captives, the murderer is an overweight Salem University student named Arthur who snaps when Dr. Leo tells Arthur that he needs to take responsibility for his own life and choices. Arthur’s body image issues and the fat-shaming he suffers at the hands of his peers and even the psychologist are presented as being the catalyst for his violence, as one of his friends recalls “how miserable he was, how much he hated being fat. But he never thought it was his own fault” (200), instead blaming his mother. The “he’s bad because he’s fat” rationalization is incredibly problematic and when Molloy asks whether Arthur will get psychiatric treatment while he’s incarcerated, this question is shrugged off, as the police officer tells her “that won’t be their primary concern … But he’ll probably be in there most of his life, so I guess they’ll tackle some of those problems while he’s there” (203). In comparison, Laughing Bill in Double Date is much more straightforward, as a repeat offender who has committed armed robbery and homicide, and takes pleasure out of scaring and hurting people, with no psychological analysis or redeeming features. There’s supernatural danger in Double Date as well, with mysterious messages written in blood on the walls (and then disappearing) that no one takes credit for and the ghostly presence that chokes Laughing Bill. With Trapped, the dangers are more supernatural, a hybrid ghost/monster bent on violent revenge, which can only be laid to rest once that vengeance has been achieved.
Whether the danger comes from flesh and blood human beings or inexplicable supernatural terrors, these characters transgress boundaries, go where they’re not supposed to go, and pay the price. From an empty dormitory to a haunted hotel and a series of labyrinthine tunnels beneath Shadyside, it’s probably best to heed the warnings and avoid these abandoned places. There’s a reason they’re off limits—it’s just that there aren’t many people alive left to tell.
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.
