In the Eighties, teen books got scarier and scarier. There were kidnap scare books, Satanic Panic scare books, War on Drugs scare books, nuclear war scare books, and in 1989 a humor editor and joke-writer for kids named Robert Lawrence Stine compressed that fear tighter, and harder, and more intensely until it exploded into a tsunami of parti-colored confetti in a book called...
Babysitting was big business in 1989 and Stine was well-prepared for writing a book about teenaged girls, having previously authored books like Phone Calls. He’d go on to write lots more horror for kids after The Babysitter, and to be honest his formula doesn’t change much over the next 2,000,000,000 books, but this is the big one because it's one of his first, it's one of his most popular, and it helped launch the influential Point Horror series for Scholastic.
Jenny Jeffers is 16 and babysitting because it pays $5/hour and her mom’s a legal secretary who doesn’t make jack. She’s sitting at the Hagens, taking care of their son, Donny, and she’s barely there for one night before she starts getting menacing phone calls and finding threatening notes stuffed into her backpack. After an enormous number of not-very red herrings it turns out Mr. Hagen is stalking her because he used to have a son AND a daughter but his daughter died due to babysitter neglect. I understand he's upset about losing a child, but if you’re only paying $5/hour a 50% survival rate sounds like about as much as you can expect.
But Mr. Hagen is not a reasonable man! He catches Jenny making out with her boyfriend, Chuck, who wears Bart Simpson shirts and jean shorts, and he takes appropriate action: driving Jenny to an abandoned rock quarry and trying to murder her. But when he goes to push her into the quarry he misses, and falls in himself and dies.
This is about the level of smarts on display by most characters in pretty much every single one of Stine’s books. Jenny has a hard time realizing that approaching headlights are actually not the glowing eyes of the dead Mr. Hagen coming for her. She’s constantly mistaking piles of laundry for dead bodies and here’s what happens when a receptionist asks her about her t-shirt:
“What a pretty t-shirt…What do you call the way the colors all run together?”
Jenny had to look down at her t-shirt to remind herself what she was wearing.
“It’s…uh…tie-dyed,” she said.
These are not geniuses.
Every single chapter ends with a fake jump scare as pounding footsteps approach Jenny from behind, or someone grabs her from behind, or she sees Mr. Hagen lunging at her from a doorway, or she turns on her bedroom light to find a dead body. Inevitably it always turns out to be someone politely approaching to say, “Miss you dropped this”, or tapping her on the shoulder to ask the time, and Mr. Hagen is never actually there, and the cadaver always, always, always turns out to be shirt draped over a chair.
People tell writers to "write what you know" so judging by his books, Stine's childhood must have been a living hell of people banging on windows, jumping out of doorways, grabbing him from behind, stabbing him with fake knives, and pulling off monster masks. Your heart aches for this poor lad, heart rate roller coasting up then down, as one life-threatening crisis after another is revealed to just be another harmless prank played by a good friend, only to have that relief cut short again and again by pounding footsteps, rattling windows, and monster attacks, only to have the adrenaline drain from his veins as that threat is dispelled in turn, and then it happens again and again. As an adult, Stine processes that trauma by inflicting it on his readers, and the cycle of abuse continues.
In The Babysitter 2 Jenny spends so much time whirling around in terror you could hook her up to a generator and power a small city. She’s vowed to never babysit again, and she’s going to a therapist to help her deal with the effects of all the stupidity she experienced in The Babysitter 1, but because she’s an idiot she winds up babysitting a ten year old boy genius named Eli who wears a “Turtle Power” t-shirt and green spandex bike shorts. No sooner has she arrived at his house than he’s pranking her with dead tarantulas and then she starts getting those phone calls threatening to kill her again.
Is it Mr. Hagen, who’s somehow still alive?
Is it Eli, who built his own telephone and brags about his high IQ just like someone on reddit?
Is it Cal, who’s new in town and meets her handing her something she dropped before delivering the can’t miss pick-up line, “Do you like Aerosmith?”
Is it Dr. Schindler, her therapist? After all, Jenny thinks he’s too tan to be a therapist. Plus he has green eyes! And, “He’s so tall, Jenny thought. He’s too tall to be a shrink!”
Maybe it’s her ex-boyfriend Chuck, who’s still wearing jean shorts?
If you couldn’t figure out it’s Dr. Schindler’s receptionist, who’s in love with the doctor and thinks Jenny is trying to steal him from her, by chapter 3 then you are an idiot, which means you might just be a character in this book. The receptionist tries to push Jenny into the same rock quarry that Mr. Hagen tried to push her into in Book 1 but it doesn’t work because it’s been filled with water since then so when she misses and falls in, she drowns.
In The Babysitter 3, Jenny vows “No more babysitting, for real this time,” then gets sent to spend the summer with her cousin Debra who’s working as — you guessed it — a babysitter!
Before long, before the creepy phone calls start again and notes begin appearing in Jenny’s bookbag and this time the list of red herring suspects include Don, Debra’s enormous jock boyfriend who playfully attempts to rape her on a regular basis; a fired, alcoholic, Irish housekeeper named Maggie; and, again, the ghost of Mr. Hagen. In a surprise twist, this time it turns out to be Jenny stalking herself because her personality split thanks to all the whirling around she did in the previous two books and she’s become Mr. Hagen. She attempts to kidnap the kid Debra’s sitting while on horseback but is foiled by the cops who send her to a mental hospital to get the help she needs.
That was about as bad as it got in Scholastic’s Point Horror books: people were constantly almost dying, only to wind up alive so that they could get sent to a mental hospital where they could get the help they need. The body count was low, and if you bumped into a serial killer it always turned out to be a department store mannequin, and if you saw a monster it was inevitably your best friend in a mask. Point Horror was the toothless piranha of teen literature, gnawing at your ankle for a really long time but there’s no blood, no one ever dies, and after a while it gets annoying. Then again, they sold 80 million copies, so what do I know?
In The Babysitter 4 Jenny gets out of the mental institution where she's spent the past year getting the help she needs, and vows to never babysit again, and this time she really, really, really means it. But then Mrs. Warsaw moves in next door with her adorable twins, Seth and Sean, and Meredith, who's five years old and "not very pretty" and Jenny just...can't...help herself...must...babysit...
This time, however, it turns out some of the kids are ghosts.
Between 1989 and 1995, Jenny was stalked, institutionalized, almost murdered twice, lost her mind, kissed way too many boys in jean shorts, tolerated a child genius, been pranked almost to death, and finally forced to babysit ghosts. It is exactly the way life is for a real teenager, just one damn thing after another, and that’s why R.L. Stine's Babysitter books are modern day classics that hold up a mirror to what, for many of us, are the most confusing years of our lives.