This Article Originally Ran On Blumhouse.com
When I was but a wee Faraci, I lived in what I thought was a very different world from everyone else. I was the only kid in my class whose parents were divorced. While all the kids my age loved New Kids On The Block, I was big into The Monkees. While they followed baseball and basketball, I was nose deep into comics and Time-Life’s MYSTERIES OF THE UNKNOWN. At the end of 8th grade, the teacher gave us all printed quotes that she thought fit who we were. For me, it was a line from Abraham Cowley’s THE WISH:
I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne’er agree
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see that my life wasn’t all that kooky. Plenty of us were raised by a single parent. Lots of us liked The Monkees. Comics are freaking awesome. Role playing games are fun. We are legion now, but in the early 90s, we were lost in the fold. That is why the weird shows stood out to us; shows like EERIE, INDIANA.
Lasting just a single season of 19 episodes that aired over three years on NBC, EERIE, INDIANA was a fantastic gateway into the weird for kids like me. The show focused on Marshall Teller, a kid from New Jersey who moves to Eerie, Indiana with his family. As soon as he arrives, one thing is clear to Marshall - Eerie is eerie. Elvis is on his paper route. Bigfoot eats his family’s garbage. The owner of the corner store wears a different disguise every day. The only person who believes Marshall is his kid sidekick, Simon. Together they investigate the oddities of the town that the rest of the residents ignore.
The show plays not only on the strangeness of American suburbia, with help from creative consultant and director Joe Dante (who also appears in an episode as himself), but also the common secrets of suburbia. The Teller family works to look like the perfect American family while both parents work full time jobs, leaving Marshall and his sister to fend for themselves on most days. Simon comes from a poor family (he’s only ever owned second hand shoes), and his father is clearly cheating on his mother. Multiple episodes comment on child abuse as well - sometimes hiding the abuse behind allegory, and sometimes shining a light directly on it.
The show also played on the national issues of the day - the savings and loan scandal is the backdrop for an episode about a lonely ATM, and when an old man mentions the depression, Marshall thinks he’s talking about the Reagan recession. MIlk carton kids. The “dangers” of Heavy Metal. Hell, it even has a shuckster businessman who bankrupts the town of Eerie, only to be brought down by the IRS. This self described “greatest businessman” is known only as… The Donald, as played by Rene Auberjonois.
The guest stars on EERIE, INDIANA are almost worthy of their own article. Appearances by Dick Miller, Henry Gibson, Belinda Balaski, Nikki Cox, Vincent Schiavelli, Ray Walston, Claude Akins, John Astin, Matt Frewer, Tobey Maguire, Michael J. Pollard, Stephen Root, and Danielle Harris.
The Danielle Harris episode, "Heart On A Chain", is easily one of the best of the short lived show - in it, Harris plays Melanie Monroe, a girl in need of a heart transplant who becomes the crush for both Marshall and another boy at school. When the other boy dies, his heart is given to Melanie. With her new heart, Melanie begins to take on some of the attributes of the original owner. Even more - when Melanie expresses feelings for Marshall, her new heart hurts. The episode plays out as a perfect allegory for survivor’s guilt.
Episodes like that are when EERIE, INDIANA worked best. The show, in its brief run, wasn’t afraid to speak to the audience in a mature fashion. This isn’t to suggest the show ever became truly scary - it didn’t - but that it respected the intelligence of the viewer, which was a rarity in the days of intentionally mindless family friendly shows like FULL HOUSE, HOME IMPROVEMENT, and MAJOR DAD.
It’s also easy to see why EERIE, INDIANA would have trouble finding an audience - the show seemed almost allergic to the best known oddities - the kind of weirdness that the average viewer would be able to look at an instantly get in on the gag. Sure, they do a werewolf episode, but even in that one, the werewolf plays second fiddle to the setup that every 13 years, the town sacrifices a young boy so everyone else can live happy lives. And yeah, there’s a mummy episode, but mainly it’s about feeling like you’re stuck in a rut.
Most of the episodes, going back to my thing on how the show is about the American suburbs, tend to push back against what was, in the early 90s, thought to be the American ideal as well as a reflection of where the country really was. Latchkey kids fighting against the blandness of perfect lawns and white picket fences by digging deeper into the world around them, finding the truths that society wants to leave buried. The lost loves and broken hearts of puberty, mangled with the horrors of encroaching adulthood. The endless need to fit in with the gang while standing out from the crowd.
The weirdness that made EERIE, INDIANA so good is more than likely what killed it. Of the 1991-1992 TV season, EERIE, INDIANA was one of the lowest rated shows on network TV, coming in 94th out of 98 prime time series that aired. The final episode to air on NBC, "Reality Takes A Holiday", has Marshall finding out that his existence is a TV show, and to boost ratings, they’re going to kill his character off. It works as something of a finale, but there were many mysteries left unanswered.
In the late 90s, EERIE, INDIANA found some success when it was run on Fox Kids. A new series, EERIE, INDIANA: THE OTHER DIMENSION, was created. Like its predecessor, it lasted a single season. I’ve personally never seen it. There are also 17 books based on the original series.
The complete series of EERIE, INDIANA was released on DVD in 2004. It has no special features, but you can buy it on Amazon for the low low price of $150! Personally, I’ll be hitting up my fellow members of the Loyal Order of Corn to see if we can’t convince Shout! Factory to get the rights and give us a real release with some solid special features. Maybe they could even do a remaster of the episodes.
Afterall, the weird kids of today need a place like Eerie to visit too.
