Reader beware.
The first five episodes of Goosebumps just dropped on Disney+ and Hulu on Friday the 13th and fans already can’t get enough. The new series inspired by R. L. Stine’s books from the ’90s is guaranteed to thrill, with new episodes dropping every Friday for a total of 10 episodes (currently canceling all my Friday plans to watch Justin Long posessed by a teenage ghost!).
Whether you’re into blood and gore, jump scares, or just straight up spooky, the new Goosebumps series has you covered with all of the above, plus some comedy along the way. The show follows a group of high schoolers as they discover secrets from their parents’ past and uncover the truth about what really happened to a teenage loner (Harold Biddle) who mysteriously died 30 years ago. As if that isn’t scary enough, fans can also follow along as the kids experience the horrors of high school.
At New York Comic Con (NYCC), The Pop Insider sat down with Executive Producers Rob Letterman, who also directed the 2015 Goosebumps movie featuring Jack Black; Hilary Winston; Nicholas Stoller; Pavun Shetty; and Conor Welch to get the inside scoop on what fans can expect from the show. The series draws from five of R. L. Stine’s most popular Goosebumps books: Say Cheese and Die!, Go Eat Worms!, Night of the Living Dummy, The Cuckoo Clock Of Doom, and The Haunted Mask. Simultaneously, the series appeals to both diehard fans and those who are unfamiliar by creating an entirely new storyline and using the books to dive deeper into getting to know the characters.
“We wanted to do something different,” Letterman says. “So this is a full reboot. The movies were great and the original series was great, but we wanted to do something unique for this, and we wanted to age it up. And, the books are anthology series. The idea here is to do something serialized where we could follow characters and live with them and dig deeper into that story; make it soapy over the course of 10 episodes. But the big idea that cracked it open for us was taking the stories and the totems from the books and mapping them to characters who all live in the same town and cross paths. But by the end of the fifth episode, we’ve gotten origin stories of each of our teen characters. And then the next five would be following them, uncovering what’s behind them. “
Aside from centering around high school instead of middle school, the new series made some additional updates to appeal to both new fans and original ones, like the use of social media and the introduction of the parent storyline. “One of the things that we added was the parent story, because that’s something that’s not really a part of the Goosebumps series as much,” Winston says. “You’re really reading from the point of view of the kids. And so in this series, the parents are really an important part of a storyline and the mystery that the kids are investigating. And so what’s really nice is if you read these books as a kid and now you have kids, you probably are going to relate maybe even to the parent characters more than the kids. So it kind of allows anybody watching it to have somebody that they feel like they kind of get in the show.”
Another important factor that makes the show appealing to all kinds of fans is the exploration of different genres of horror. From gross out to ghosts, each episode features a different kind of horror and the producers made sure to choose R. L. Stine books with the right inspiration. Similar to the book series, most of the horrors and scares come from relatable personal issues. “We knew we were going to use some of the most popular books, and we wanted the genres of horror to be different and not step on each other either,” Shetty says. “But the most important thing is that the story in the books tied in exactly with the personal issue that the kids were going through themselves. So in the second episode (*SPOILER ALERT*), the character Isabella is a wallflower, and people ignore her so she’s an online troll then she finds this mask that’s pulled from The Haunted Mask and puts it on and turns into a real troll. And that’s linked to what’s happening in her real life.”
This relatable, funny, and scary series is the perfect comedy and horror mashup for fans of all things spooky. It will definitely give you goosebumps, whether you’re a nostalgic fan or just dipping your toes into the works of R. L. Stine. Goosebumps is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
