How the new “Goosebumps” TV show pays homage to R.L. Stein's beloved books
If the words "Scholastic book fair" instantly floods your mind with memories of flipping wafer-thin catalog pages, chances are you read a Goosebumps or two. Now, a team of producers raised on the R.L. Stine books is taking those memories and packaging them into a newly released Disney+ and Hulu series that welcomes new audiences while enticing their parents with tomes etched in their minds from childhood.
"We wanted to make sure right out of the gates that our show felt really fresh and new and current, while still obviously paying homage to the source material, to the books that we all grew up [with] and loved," Goosebumps executive producer Conor Welch said on a recent PaleyFest Fall TV Preview panel moderated by EW.
The new Goosebumps follows five high schoolers in the small town of Port Lawrence as they unearth dark secrets linked to the tragic passing of a teen boy named Harold Biddle, who died three decades earlier. After leaving a Halloween party at the Biddle home (soon to be occupied by a possessed teacher played by Justin Long), each of the five teens (Ana Yi Puig, Miles McKenna, Will Price, Zack Morris, Isa Briones) are haunted by different totems that they came across while at the house.
Disney+; Scholastic 'Goosebumps' the TV series; 'Goosebumps' the book series
"There's the Polaroid camera that predicts a horrifying future. There's the cuckoo clock that jumps you back in time. There's the mask that first emboldens the wearer and then starts to take over their life. There're the worms that sort of take over the host. And then a scrapbook that literally sucks you in," explained Welch, referencing key items and events from Stein's Goosebump books Say Cheese and Die!, The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, The Haunted Mask, Go Eat Worms!, as well as the 2015 Goosebumps movie.
Welch's fellow executive producer Pavun Shetty teased there are plenty of other Easter eggs to find as well. "We tried to plant different seeds, so people who are fans of the original books would pick things up throughout the entire series," said Shetty. "But, ultimately, I think the most important thing to us was that it felt like the issues that the kids and parents were dealing with were real issues that every kid and every parent feels like they deal with — and that it felt authentic, because I think otherwise all the crazy stuff that's on there and all the time travel and different episodes doesn't really land, unless you have that."
"The books never talked down to the kids," added Welch. "It felt like really you were in their shoes. And so that was sort of some of the magic that we really felt we needed to capture for this, that we were not patronizing or talking down to these teens, but really sort of illuminating their experiences."
One illuminating on-set experience for the young cast was learning to use a relic from the past: "It was fun watching the cast actually handle a Polaroid camera, like an actual one from the time period," said Shetty, "because they had no idea what it was at all and what direction [was] forward or backwards."
Goosebumps is available now on Disney+ and Hulu.
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