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Watch Goosebumps — Season 1 with a subscription on Disney+. Wickedly inventive enough to give viewers the creeps if not nightmares, Goosebumps solidly transplants R.L. Stine's spooky stories ...
- (39)
- Justin Long
- Erin O'malley
- October 13, 2023
Oct 12, 2023 · A TV review of the Disney+/Hulu series based on R.L. Stine's horror novels for kids. The reviewer praises the cast, the structure, and the first half of the season, but criticizes the second half for becoming a generic YA soap opera.
Upset about moving from the big city to a small town, young Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) finds a silver lining when he meets his beautiful neighbor Hannah (Odeya Rush). The teen is surprised to ...
- (165)
- Rob Letterman
- PG
- Jack Black
- At last, a teen soap starring Slappy the Dummy
- Goosebumps Gallery
- Who's your favorite classic YA horror author?
- Verdict
By A.A. Dowd
Posted: Oct 9, 2023 4:00 pm
Telling someone that you grew up on Goosebumps won't exactly give away your age. R.L. Stine has been writing these slim, preteen potboilers for so long now that his fan base spans multiple generations; if you were a kid anytime between the early '90s and this past summer, you might have memories of tearing through one of his junior horror yarns. You'd also fall somewhere in the range of demographics courted by the newest TV version of those books, a 10-episode series arriving on Disney+ and Hulu this month. Following the supernatural happenings experienced by a group of suburban teenagers and their parents, the show aims for some sweet spot between current trends and '90s nostalgia, as if hoping to capture the interest of anyone who ever read past the colorful cover of one of Stine's colorfully titled tales of monsters in small-town America.
The first episode begins in 1993, with Kurt Loder on a TV and the melancholy strum of R.E.M.'s "Drive" on a boombox. (As in another recent Stine adaptation, Netflix's Fear Street trilogy, expensive radio hits set the retro scene.) A teenage boy, Harold Biddle (Ben Cockell), dies in a fire, the flames releasing a cheesy skull-faced specter into the evening air. Only later will we get the full story, a tamer variation on Freddy Krueger's origins. Suffice to say, Harold will soon make like the bucket hat and mount a comeback.
Flash forward to present day. The ghost's target is a diverse, wholesome group of high-school friends in the fictional harbor town of Port Lawrence, all converging at a party thrown in the house where Harold died, which is filthy with the kind of stuff that gave a typical Goosebumps story its spooky hook: a haunted mask, a cursed camera, a jar of worms. Though the characters are played by actors noticeably in their mid-20s, they're as straight-edge and celebate as the younger kids Stine tended to write. It's a vision of teen life safe for a Scholastic (and Disney) audience.
Beyond the shoddiness of the effects work, none of this bears much resemblance to the more faithful, '90s Goosebumps show, low-budget after-school anthology that adapted many of Stine's 100-some-page reads. And though co-creator Rob Letterman also directed the first Goosebumps movie, starring an amusingly hammy Jack Black as Stine himself, the new series is much different than that antic Jumanji riff. This time, the source material has been shaped into a sprawling teen soap opera of buried familial secrets and chaste love triangles. Often, it's like Stranger Things with the point of reference shifted from Stephen King to the nearly as famous kid-lit author who's caught King comparisons his whole career.
John Bellairs
Caroline B. Cooney
Lois Duncan
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R.L. Stine
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After a faithful '90s anthology series and a less-faithful pair of Jack Black movies, Goosebumps returns to the screen in the form of a teen soap that pulls some of the supernatural mumbo jumbo of R.L. Stine's bestselling kid-lit series into the story of high-schoolers haunted by a vengeful Gen X ghost. The performances are endearing (especially Ju...
- A.A. Dowd
Oct 12, 2023 · 'Goosebumps,' Disney+ and Hulu's adaptation of R.L. Stine's YA novels, follows five teens embroiled in a spooky supernatural mystery.
- Angie Han
A group of five high schoolers embark on a shadowy and twisted journey to investigate the tragic passing three decades earlier of a teen named Harold Biddle, while also unearthing dark secrets ...
Oct 13, 2023 · “Goosebumps” has been universally beloved for decades, but the extensive characters and storylines clearly overwhelmed the writing staff of this new series.
