Books Teen Horror Time Machine Cliff Zone: Beware of Falling Teens In ’90s teen horror, even the topography can be a murder weapon. By Alissa Burger | Published on March 5, 2026 Photo by Stephen Andrews [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Stephen Andrews [via Unsplash] In ‘90s teen horror, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a cliff. Seriously, cliffs are EVERYWHERE. The characters can live anywhere in the country, in a city or a small town or the middle of nowhere, and somewhere nearby, there is going to be a cliff. And when there’s a cliff, somebody’s bound to fall over the edge, get pushed off, or hear some mysterious story about something that happened there and go to check it out for themselves (with terrifying consequences). Forget about falling rocks: in a ‘90s teen horror world, it’s the falling bodies that you’ve got to watch out for.  These cliffs build on the established foundation of the Gothic wilderness. They’re almost always isolated, far from any populated areas or potential help. Characters frequently hike (or bike or walk) through the woods to get there. In the Gothic tradition, this wilderness is an inherent threat, representing a lack of civilization, an untamed place where anything can happen. For the most part, these modern teens don’t spend a lot of time in the wilderness, preferring their high school hallways and the mall, but every now and then, an outdoorsy adventure is just too good to pass up. Once characters venture out of their comfort zones and into this wilderness, the danger is omnipresent.  In R.L. Stine’s Fear Street book The Overnight (1989) and Carol Ellis’ Camp Fear (1993), characters go camping—Stine’s on their own and Ellis’ at an organized summer camp—and they find themselves surrounded by all kinds of threats that could potentially hurt or kill them, including bears, venomous snakes, murderers, and (of course) cliffs. There’s no such thing as safety in the wilderness, as far as the Gothic and horror traditions are concerned.  In many of these books, cliffs are the site and source of mysteries: something terrible happened there, but no one’s quite sure what. In Stine’s The Dead Girlfriend (1993), Jonathan’s previous girlfriend Louisa died when she fell from a cliff just outside of town. As far as anyone knows, Jonathan was the only person there with her, so speculation runs rampant about whether or not he killed her. There’s similar uncertainty in A. Bates’s Mother’s Helper (1991): Becky has a summer job working as a nanny on an isolated island, where she meets Cleve, a seemingly nice young man… who might or might not have pushed the local sheriff off a cliff. Notably, in both of these cases, the possibility that Jonathan and Cleve might be capable of this kind of violence does very little to deter the female protagonists’ romantic interest in them. Jonathan and Cleve are mysterious and the girls are willing to follow that mystery, even if it may end in them taking a long fall off a cliff edge too. The mystery in Ellis’ The Body (1996) is a bit more tragic: Lisa was found at the bottom of a cliff, alive but paralyzed and unable to speak, so she can’t tell anyone what happened to her. When Melanie is hired to read to Lisa, she sets her mind to solving this mystery, and finding out what happened to Lisa becomes essential to her own survival.  Sometimes that mystery is nothing more than a really horrible “oops.” There are LOTS of accidents that happen on the edges of cliffs in these books. This is the case in The Body, where Melanie eventually discovers that, after witnessing a murder, Lisa got disoriented and accidentally went over the cliff while running away from someone in the dark. Something similar happens in Richie Tankersley Cusick’s Starstruck (1996)— Miranda is running from someone who is trying to kill her and nearly plunges headlong over the side of a cliff. (Miranda has a happier ending to her cliff encounter: she catches herself and is rescued by her love interest Nick, avoiding both murder and cliff plummet, while her pursuer is the one who goes over the edge). In Stine’s The Boyfriend (1990), Dex is roughhousing near the edge of a cliff with his friend Pete when he topples over the edge.  Horrors build up when characters follow an accident with an attempt to cover up the truth and bury their dark secrets. In Stine’s Fear Street book The Sleepwalker (1990), Mayra’s sleepwalking stems from a repressed memory of the time her boyfriend Walker stole a car and they accidentally ran another car off the road and over the edge of a cliff (Walker hypnotized Mayra to forget the whole thing when she wanted to confess). The post-accident cover up in Christopher Pike’s novella-length “Collect Call” (featured in the 1991 Point Horror anthology Thirteen) is gruesome: Janice and Caroline head home from a party with Janice at the wheel, even though she’s had too much to drink and knows this is a bad idea. The car goes over a cliff, Caroline appears to have been killed, and Janice moves her friend’s body behind the steering wheel, staging the accident, clearing herself, and preparing to walk away … until the car catches on fire and Janice realizes Caroline wasn’t killed in the crash, but  is now trapped and burning alive. In Stine’s Fear Street book The New Year’s Eve Party (1995), cover up and cliff swap places: Beth and Jeremy are driving too fast on icy roads and hit a boy with their car. When Jeremy attempts to flee the scene, they hit another patch of ice and go over the side of a cliff.  While some of these cliff encounters are accidental, cliffs are also remarkably convenient spots for murder. After all, deep in the Gothic wilderness, there’s no one to see what really happens— and as long as the one doing the murdering is the sole survivor, they can tell whatever story they choose. But most of the time, things don’t go quite according to plan, and while there’s a successful cliff-pushing murder in Stine’s Fear Street book One Evil Summer (1994), there are a whole lot more attempted murders than actual, completed ones. Characters nearly get pushed off of cliffs to their deaths in Cusick’s The Lifeguard (1988) and Help Wanted (1993), Stine’s The Babysitter (1989), Ellis’s My Secret Admirer (1989), A. Bates’s Final Exam (1990), and Diane Hoh’s The Train (1992) and Truth or Die (Nightmare Hall series, 1994).  Cliffs seem to be a convenient one size fits all solution to pesky problems. Want revenge? Push them off a cliff. Need to make sure no one tells your secret? Push them off a cliff. Need to eliminate a romantic rival? Push them off a cliff. No matter what the question is, the cliff is always the answer. But since these are all attempted murders, pushing people off of cliffs doesn’t turn out to be nearly as effective as the pushers hoped.  Pike’s Fall Into Darkness (1990) deserves special consideration here, because the goings-on at this cliff are particularly complicated. Ann and Paul have an intricately plotted plan to fake Ann’s death and frame their friend Sharon by making it look like Sharon pushed Ann off of a cliff. (Ann’s brother Jerry took his own life and Ann blames Sharon because of her romantic history with Jerry). The plan is for Ann to plunge over the side of the cliff, tethered by a rope; Paul will make sure the rope is secured until Ann can untie herself and get to safety, and then they’ll meet up later and start a new life together. But Ann crashes into the cliff face a bit harder than expected, suffering a broken arm and a concussion. Paul unties the rope in what could be an attempt to finish Ann off—he doesn’t really like her all that much and she just wrote him into her will to inherit a bunch of money if she dies—but Ann gets herself untied and survives. Sharon is found not guilty, heads back to the SAME cliff with her “nice guy” friend Chad, who turns out to be not such a nice guy after all, and Sharon almost gets pushed over the cliff herself.  While, elementally speaking, all of these cliffs have air and earth (in the fall and the hard landing), Stine’s cliffs often have water as well. In his Fear Street books, characters frequently head to high places to look down over the valley and the Cononoka River and in Cheerleaders: The New Evil (1994), Corky sends a whole school bus full of basketball players and cheerleaders over a cliff to a frozen lake below in an attempt to drown them and drive out the evil that has inhabited her friends. And the cliff drama in Stine’s The Hitchhiker (1993) is much less convoluted, but it’s one of my all-time favorite attempted murder cliff scenes. In The Hitchhiker, Christina and Terri are on their way back from spring break and pick up a hitchhiker. There’s a whole lot of bait-and-switching going on as characters’ try to figure out one another’s true intentions and dark secrets, but the final showdown ends on a low cliff (which to be honest, is really more of a slightly rocky outcropping, but high enough to push someone off of to their doom) in the Florida swamp where they’re all about to be pushed over the edge into a pond below, which is FULL OF PIRANHAS.  While Christina and Terri just happened to be roadtripping when they found themselves at the piranha cliff, there are several other ‘90s teen horror books where cliff and car are two pieces of the same puzzle. This is the case in Pike’s “Collect Call” and Stine’s Fear Street books The Sleepwalker and One Evil Summer, where Chrissy pushes both her rival and his car off a cliff with her telekinetic powers. In Cusick’s April Fools (1990), Frank, Hildy, and Belinda nearly meet their end trapped in a car and pushed over the edge of a cliff, a redux of a murder earlier in the book. In Bad Moonlight (1995), another of Stine’s Fear Street books, Danielle’s emerging lycanthropy is complicated by invasive thoughts of her parents’ deaths, who she is told went over a cliff in their car three years ago, as well as a hallucination of her rock band’s van following in those same doomed tire tracks. In Stine’s The Boyfriend, Joanna is fleeing from the scene after her boyfriend Dex falls over the edge of a cliff when she gets into a head-on collision with a truck, while in Bates’s Final Exam, Jeff plans to push both Kelly and her car over the side of a cliff, in a misbegotten attempt to gain his father’s approval through murder.  When Jeff’s attempted murder in Final Exam doesn’t pan out, he tries to take his own life by throwing himself over the edge of the cliff, though he survives and is taken into custody, with intensive psychiatric treatment in his future, as his psychiatrist points out that “now no one can fool themselves into thinking his problem isn’t so bad” (198). Ideally, it shouldn’t take jumping off a cliff to get mental health support, but this ending at least provides a possible future for Jeff. Other characters who take this same leap aren’t quite so lucky. In both Help Wanted and Fall Into Darkness, when characters’ machinations are thwarted, they decide that death is their best option, jumping from cliffs themselves when they no longer have the option of pushing someone else.  Characters in these books find themselves on cliffs way more often than would seem likely, both in terms of geography and “where should we go now?” narrative reasoning, but they sure are dramatic. The stakes are (literally) high and the confrontations that take place at the edges of these cliffs are frequently life or death ones. Coming upon cliff after cliff in these books, I’m reminded of John Mulaney’s observation that, based on television and pop culture representations, he “always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.” Same here, but with cliffs. Whether accident, murder, or suicide, cliffs are dangerous places to be in ‘90s teen horror books. The view might be great, but the fall is a killer.[end-mark] The post Cliff Zone: Beware of Falling Teens appeared first on Reactor.