When you tell someone you grew up with Goosebumps, you’re not necessarily revealing your age. RL Stine has been writing these lean, youthful potboilers for so long that his fan base spans multiple generations; If you were a kid between the early ’90s and this past summer, you may have memories of tearing through one of his junior horror films. They would also fall somewhere in the demographic wooed by the latest TV version of these books, a 10-part series coming to Disney+ and Hulu this month. The show follows the supernatural events experienced by a group of suburban teenagers and their parents, trying to find a balance between current trends and ’90s nostalgia, as if hoping to pique the interest of everyone who ever has Read beyond the colorful covers of Stine’s books to colorfully titled stories about monsters in small-town America.
The first episode begins in 1993 with Kurt Loder on television and the melancholic sound of REM’s “Drive” on a boombox. (As in another recent Stine adaptation, Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, expensive radio hits dominate the retro scene.) A teenager, Harold Biddle (Ben Cockell), dies in a fire, and the flames take away a tacky one Ghost with skull face in the evening air. Only later do we learn the full story, a tamer version of Freddy Krueger’s origins. Suffice to say, Harold will soon be like the bucket hat and make a comeback.
Goosebumps Gallery
Looking back at the present. The ghost’s target is a diverse, wholesome group of high school friends in the fictional port town of Port Lawrence, who all meet for a party at the house where Harold died, which is full of things that make for a typical Goosebumps story make out its spooky hook: a haunted mask, a cursed camera, a jar of worms. Although the characters are obviously played by actors in their mid-20s, they are just as straightforward and solemn as the younger children Stine enjoyed writing. It’s a vision of safe teenage life for a Scholastic (and Disney) audience.
Aside from the shoddy effects work, none of this bears much resemblance to the more faithful ’90s Goosebumps show, a low-budget after-school anthology that adapted many of Stine’s 100-odd page readings. And although co-creator Rob Letterman also directed the first Goosebumps film, which starred the amusing Jack Black as Stine himself, the new series is significantly different from that hilarious Jumanji riff. This time, the source material has been molded into a sprawling teen soap opera about buried family secrets and chaste love triangles. Often it’s like Stranger Things, with the reference point shifted from Stephen King to the almost equally famous children’s author, who has observed King comparisons throughout his career.
For a while, the series at least loosely follows Stine’s career, drawing on his early best-selling library as each character finds themselves in a different supernatural predicament inspired by the books. We get evil clones, body swap shenanigans, a Groundhog Day riff, a Tremors sheen. Letterman and co-creator Nicolas Stoller (The Muppets, Neighbors) attempt to connect the ghostly developments to the teens’ emotional conflicts: An online troll (Ana Yi Puig) transforms into a bookish young go-getter (Will Price). shielding himself from emotional pain becomes literally indestructible, and a football hero (Zack Morris), whose everything depends on his performance, begins to have Polaroid visions of impending disaster. The cast is serious and likeable – part Breakfast Club, part Scooby Gang.
But “Goosebumps” loses momentum the more it delves into the buried transgressions of the children’s parents. The plot becomes increasingly complicated, driven by a vengeful presence that can take over bodies and create hallucinations, banishing characters into a scribbled dream world. “It seemed like the past, but felt like the future,” says one of the children after astral time travel. “It is hard to explain.” She can say that again! Just barely holding things together, Justin Long brings comedic, pathetic and post-barbaric villainous notes to his performance as a teacher at Port Lawrence High.
“Goosebumps” loses momentum the more it delves into the buried transgressions of the children’s parents.
The joy of “Goosebumps” has always been in the simplicity of its youthful thrills: the books were addictive cliffhanger machines whose pithy prose quickly captivated young readers. The fact that they did not tell a grand narrative and that each story was self-contained probably contributes to their enduring popularity. Since the characters weren’t carried over, you could hop on the Goosebumps Express at any time along the way. Television works differently, and there is no reason to feel undue reverence for a series of books that their author has produced for literally decades in a monthly mercenary program. At the same time, Stine’s body of work – his standard tales of monster blood and evil dolls – may not be the best basis for an extended YA saga.
However, young viewers could also be drawn into the melodrama. Who among them wouldn’t understand the story of an older generation screwing things up for a younger generation? For everyone else, nothing in the series will be as unsettling as the realization that the early Goosebumps readers are now old enough to have Goosebumps readers of their own. It’s enough to make you feel like the grilling skeletons on the cover of Say Cheese and Die!