Stanley is the anti-villainous main antagonist of the 20th Original Series Goosebumps book The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight. While not truly evil, he causes the evil forces in the story.
Overview[]
Stanley is the mentally challenged farmhand of the protagonists' grandparents. He lives on the farm with his son, nicknamed Sticks. He has been teased by his employers, the grandparents, because of his mental disability. He has somehow acquired a book of superstitions, which explains bad omens and teaches spells. Fed up with being teased, Stanley used a spell to bring the scarecrows on the farm to life, using them to intimidate the grandparents into never teasing him again, making food that he likes, and no longer telling scary stories (which frightened him). Satisfied, Stanley made the scarecrows inanimate again. Unknown to Stanley, not all of the scarecrows were made inanimate again, and some walk around at night.
When the protagonists, Jodie and Mark, arrive on the farm, they notice that their grandparents are acting different and begin to notice scratching sounds from the windows at night. Eventually, they learn the truth, and Stanley does as well. Stanley tries to use a spell to make all the scarecrows inanimate again, but accidentally brings them all back to life. The scarecrows quickly turn on Stanley and attempt to kill him along with his son Sticks and the others. Sticks manages to destroy the scarecrows with torches.
With the scarecrows gone, Stanley vows to never again read the chapter of the book detailing how to bring scarecrows to life, but still keeps the book itself. The next day, he is reading a different chapter and accidentally says the spell needed to bring stuffed bears to life, resurrecting the taxidermy bear in the living room where Jodie is sitting. The book ends with the hungry bear looking at Jodie and preparing to eat her, while she has nobody in the house to protect her apart from Stanley in the next room, who may not even be able to cast the spell to de-animate the bear given he seemed unable to de-animate the scarecrows earlier after accidentally reanimating them again and was left needing to be saved by Sticks with the others. However, the story is narrated in past tense first person perspective from Jodie's point of view, implying she did somehow survive.
Episode[]
In the episode, Stanley is changed to the point of not being an antagonist at all. He is not mentally disabled like in the book, and instead of bringing the scarecrows to life to intimidate the grandparents into treating him better, he did so to make them more effective scarecrows. Once the scarecrows turned out to be evil and tried to kill Stanley, Sticks, and the grandparents, he used his spell book to de-animate them, but missed some like in the book. The ending is different. Instead of accidentally bringing a stuffed bear to life, Stanley accidentally animates the farm's thresher to life, which immediately advances toward the house to try and kill everyone, leaving their fates uncertain.
Personality[]
In the book, Stanley is mentally disabled and childlike, being afraid of scary stories and being noted as "slow". He is very superstitious and follows the advice in his book to avoid bad omens. He is an opportunist who used the scarecrows to blackmail his employers into treating him with respect, making cornflakes instead of pancakes (which he hated), and no longer telling scary stories. Despite intimidating and blackmailing his employers and forcing Jodie and Mark to go without the pancakes and stories they liked so much simply because he doesn't like them, the story tries to make him relatively sympathetic. As long as he was treated the way he wanted, he continued to do hard work on the farm; he carried everything himself while on the way to the fishing creek with Jodie and Mark and would not have them carry anything even when they offered. He is still shown to act respectful to his employers as long as they treat him similarly and do not tease him. He is not really evil like most Goosebumps antagonists, however his selfish and irresponsible actions put everyone at risk, and he is shown to have learned nothing in the end, as he still keeps his book and reads the spells out loud, which ends up animating a stuffed bear and endangering the life of Jodie.
External Links[]
- Stanley on the Goosebumps Wiki
