母とともに田舎町へ引っ越してきた少年ザックは、隣家の美少女ハンナと親しくなった。だがハンナの父はそんなザックを彼女から遠ざけようと邪険にする。ある日、女性の悲鳴を耳にしたザックは、ハンナの身を案じて隣家へ忍び込む。彼はそこで、なぜか鍵を掛けられたホラー作家R・L・スタインの著書群を見つけ、思わず鍵を開けてしまう。実はハンナの父こそがスタインであり、その鍵は本に記された怪物たちを封印していたのだ。
A bookshop clerk starts seeing the disfigured killer from her favorite 1950s pulp novels come to life and start killing people around her.
Another entry in the "books come alive" subgenre, with possibly more books coming alive than any other. We begin with some musical numbers, notably the various pages of Green Pastures all joining in on a song, The Thin Man entering The White House Cookbook and exiting much fatter, and The House of Seven (Clark) Gables singing backup to Old King Cole. The Three Musketeers break loose, become Three Men on a Horse, grab the Seven Keys to Baldpate, and set the Prisoner of Zenda free. They are soon chased by horsemen from The Charge of the Light Brigade and Under Two Flags and beset by the cannons of All Quiet on the Western Front. All this disturbs the sleep of Rip Van Winkle, who opens Hurricane so that everyone is (all together now) Gone with the Wind.
It's midnight at the bookstore and all the book and magazine characters are coming to life. When a bulldog from an adventure book uses a Boswell Sisters-like performance by girls in a travel magazine as a distraction to rob a bank, he is chased, caught, and sentenced to, of course "Life" (the magazine). But there's also a conveniently placed "Escape" magazine....
In this entertaining short, famous literary figures step out of the pages of books after dark.