I’ve been taking my sweet, creepy time with finishing the new Disney+ Goosebumps show before it officially starts streaming this coming Friday the 13th. It’s a more mature, more sinister take on R.L. Stine’s beloved safe-scare children’s book series, and I’ve got to say, I think it’s a solid change of direction and pace for the franchise.
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to chat with series co-creators and executive producers Rob Letterman (Detective Pikachu, Goosebumps 2015) and Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bros, Platonic) all about the development of this fresh take on the early ‘90s’ biggest literary phenomenon.
To quote the legend himself: Reader beware, you’re in for a scare…
Wallace: To start, I really want to know how you both started to develop this darker take on Goosebumps. Notably Rob, with you coming from the lighter-hearted 2015 film with Jack Black.
Letterman: Well, Neal Moritz, who produced the [Goosebumps 2015] movie, called up and said he had the TV rights and asked if I would be into it. Which I said ‘yes’ immediately—it was a very short conversation [laughs].
I called Nick, and we’ve collaborated in the past many times and we’re good friends. It’s just effortless with Nick, and he said ‘yes’, and we dived in.
Aging it up…we talked about doing that from the get-go, for a lot of reasons, and hopefully they’re all the right reasons. One of them was—you said it yourself—you were a reader of Goosebumps, and there’s a lot of kids who read the books in the ‘90s who are now in their 30s and 40s, and still have fond memories of the books, and we wanted to capture that audience.
We also wanted to make sure we were doing something for adults with or without kids, for a younger audience, as well as for people who don’t know anything about Goosebumps. We wanted to make a bigger, broader show, and elevate it and be able to play with more sophisticated themes. It was a great opportunity.
Goosebumps is such an amazing sandbox to play in. And just on a personal level, when I did the movie, my kids were a certain age, and now they’re teenagers. I feel like I take projects and sort of evolve with them as my kids grow older. So I don’t know what I’m going to do when they go to college. I guess I’m out of options at that point [laughs].
Wallace: Then you’ll have to really age Goosebumps up! [laughs]
Stoller: Yeah [laughs], but when Rob called me, I was really excited. My focus is comedy. It’s people in love fighting with each other. That’s my genre, I think. I love working with Rob; we share a tone, a sensibility. I love horror, but I’ve never done it before.
So the idea of getting to collaborate on something that was horror-based, something that was coming-of-age, something about teenagers—I have a teenage daughter, in addition to two littler ones, so it just seemed really fun and exciting and a challenge. Also, the Goosebumps books, there’s so many classic stories to work with.
Wallace: Like you mentioned, there’s so many Goosebumps books to draw from. How did you go about choosing which specific stories to weave into the overarching narrative of the show?
Letterman: At first, it was kind of organic. So when we started staring at the blank page, we were just trying to figure out what the show was supposed to be. The books are an anthology series, and we wanted to be a serialized show over ten episodes. So the idea formed of taking the first five episodes/books and mapping the basic story and the totems to characters that co-exist in a town. That was the kernel of the idea.
Then as we fleshed out the characters, and figured out the arcs and who they were and what we wanted them to be, we really looked at the first 60 [Goosebumps] books, to be honest. We honed in on what we thought would be the best Goosebumps books that would fit the characters that we cooked up. We also made sure that each of those five books that we picked were unique enough and not overlapping each other in any way.
Stoller: We also wanted to have different horror subgenres, whether it be jump-out scares, a ghost thing, body horror, gross-out stuff, sci-fi horror.
Wallace: Speaking of body horror, what an interesting choice to bring in Go Eat Worms! There were some seriously gross moments in that particular episode where I was just like, yeah, this is awesome. And also, with The Haunted Mask episode, I feel like you both zeroed in on what could make a Goosebumps story unnerving.
I feel like horror is such a nuanced genre, and it’s so easy to make it corny or not work, so kudos for actually making Goosebumps scary.
Letterman/Stoller: Thank you!
Wallace: What about R.L. Stine? What’s been his reaction to the new show?
Letterman: Well, thankfully, he loves it. It would have been a huge bummer if that part didn’t work out [laughs]. He’s been great. We got his blessing early on. And because I did the first movie, and he had a cameo in that, so I got to know him a little bit. There was a shorthand there.
He couldn’t have been nicer about it. We showed him the episodes when we were finishing up in post and he wrote a very sweet note. It feels good to to make him proud of the work. He’s talked to us a lot about a lot of things, but there were a couple things that stood out.
When he wrote those books, the thing I loved about it when I read them to my kids, is that he never pandered down to a younger reader. I thought that was amazing, and we embrace that quite a bit. They were Stephen King novels that were accessible to younger readers, which was the magic of it all. Very universal themes.
He also balanced horror and comedy in an effortless way and that speaks to our tone.
Stoller: You [Rob] had mentioned he said to you that the key to his books is ‘be careful what you wish for’. The characters in the TV show, as in the books, don’t just accidentally move into a creepy house. They all want stuff, and maybe they want the wrong thing, and that’s what causes the horror to happen. It’s certainly relatable as a kid or a teenager but something relatable even as an adult.
And it’s very important to go to the source when you’re adapting something. It’s easy to be like, ‘whatever, person who created this, I’m gonna do my own thing’. But you can’t, because the creator understands it better than anyone. It was [key] that we access what was important to [R.L. Stine] and what made his book series so popular.
Wallace: On that note, is there a pressure when you’re adapting something this big with this big of an audience, especially when you’re taking it in a slightly more grown-up direction? The original Goosebumps books emphasized safe-scare levity and never touched on heavy themes like divorce, affairs, or sexuality. The new show does.
Letterman: Um, I feel pressure about everything, just in general. We want to speak to the hardcore fans, for sure. We also wanted to make a show that works and is honest. We both have teenagers and we see the world through that lens. Teenagers now, they’re different. They’re worrying about different things. They don’t have the same hang-ups that previous generations have. There’s bigger stakes in the world for them, so we need to couch it in this supernatural horror show.
Stoller: The books are so relatable because they are boiled down to their essence. One of the reasons they’re timeless is because they don’t have a lot of pop culture references, but it’s also because of how spare they are. To turn that into a TV show, we had to fill it in a bit.
I think about the classics of my childhood like E.T., which is a movie all about divorce, and there’s layers to it. I remember my 6-year-old at the time was 4 when she saw it and totally understood it, and she wasn’t picking up the divorce stuff. But the reason I love watching it is because of all those layers. So you add the layers but keep the core in-tact.
Wallace: The last thing I’ll mention is that, I just thought it was cool how there’s an openly gay character in the new Goosebumps show. That was never in the original books because that stuff was generally never discussed, I think. It was awesome seeing the next evolution of the franchise.
Stoller: Thanks. Well, that [comes from] just watching our kids.
Letterman: Exactly.
Stoller: My 16-year-old daughter has friends who are gay, straight, bi. They don’t think about it. It would be dishonest to not include that kind of character.
Letterman: And we don’t make a big deal out of it in the show. The idea was simply, the jock’s best friend is gay, and that’s it, and everyone accepts it. We move on and tell the story. We didn’t dive into any tropes about that.
Stoller: Yeah, because that’s what we see with our own kids. We copy what we see. It’s very lazy [laughs].
Wallace: Well, it works! [laughs]
Read the full article here
