We first heard an ethereal, sinister whisper that a live-action Goosebumps TV series might be coming to haunt us back in 2020. But now that whisper has become a piercing scream of utter terror, such as one might make when menaced by a sentient ventriloquist’s dummy, which shrieks, “That live-action Goosebumps TV series is now actually happening over at Disney+!” The horror! The horror!
Variety broke the news that Disney has ordered 10 episodes of the new series based on the immensely prolific R.L. Stine’s immensely popular kids’ horror novels of the ‘90s. While the 235 (!) books in the series were an anthology starring different children encountering different horrors — as was the first live-action TV adaptation that ran from 1995-98 — it sounds like this show might be rather different:
“The series follows a group of five high schoolers who unleash supernatural forces upon their town and must all work together — thanks to and in spite of their friendships, rivalries, and pasts with each other — in order to save it, learning much about their own parents’ teenage secrets in the process.”
There’s a lot going on in this description that sounds non-Goosebumps-y to me, but of those 235 books, I’ve read approximately… hmm… less than one of them, so what do I know? Well, I know that the series will be executive-produced by Neal H. Moritz, who also did the 2015 and 2016 live-action movies starring Jack Black as R.L. Stine (OK, it was more of a cameo in the second one, but whatever). Robert Letterman, who directed the first film and the excellent Pokémon Detective Pikachu, and Nick Stoller, who wrote the two most recent Muppets movies, will both write and EP the show as well.