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Oct 13, 2023 · The first five episodes of the new 'Goosebumps' series have just premiered on Disney+ and Hulu. Inspired by the horror novels written by R.L. Stine, the series follows a group of high school students who investigate the mysterious death of a teen. So, is it worth the watch?
Cheesy "horror" which is what I want from my Goosebumps. It is admittedly mixed in with a bit of "CW-ish" teen drama, but not TOO heavy (the last episode in the snow got into it a bit more than the other episodes).
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- 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
Christopher Pike
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 9, 2023 · Goosebumps premieres October 13 on Disney+ and Hulu, but before the debut the first reviews have surfaced online, putting the series on track for a strong start thanks to its Rotten Tomatoes...
- Writer-Social Media Coordinator
With Zack Morris, Isa Briones, Miles McKenna, Ana Yi Puig. "Goosebumps" is a horror series telling the story of a group of five high school students who unleash supernatural forces upon their town. Now, they must work together in order to save it.
- (11K)
- 2023-10-13
- Action, Adventure, Comedy
- 40
Jul 29, 2019 · Let's look at the best and worst episodes of Goosebumps and get nostalgic for this horror series. Best: Say Cheese And Die The Goosebumps episode "Say Cheese And Die" stars Ryan Gosling, so for that reason alone, it's fun to re-watch and see him as a young actor.
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Oct 9, 2023 · This is made worse by cheesy CGI effects that accompany the specter haunting the cast, proving why many of the best works in the space choose to obscure the monster until a terrifying last-act...
