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| Frankie Franken |
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| R. L. Stine |
Hello, everybody, and welcome to today’s installment of The
MonsterGrrls’ Thir13en For Halloween! This year our theme is Tales Of Unease, where we look at horror in literature and writing, as well as film and TV. And today we’re taking a
look a something that may be familiar to some of you horror fans that
grew up in the ‘90’s—Goosebumps, the horror book series
for younger readers by R. L. Stine. Branching out into a television series and two
movies, Goosebumps was the series that brought an entire
generation to horror, and it’s still popular today!
Robert
L. Stine grew up in Bexley, Ohio, and started writing at age nine
when he found a typewriter in his attic, and started typing out
stories and joke books. Graduating from Ohio State University in
1965, Stine edited the humor magazine The Sundial for three of his
four years there, and later moved to New York to pursue a writing
career. (Our Mad Doctor remembers a humor magazine for teenagers
called Bananas, published by Scholastic Press, that Stine
edited and wrote most of the material for.) In the Eighties, Stine
co-created and was head scriptwriter for the Nickelodeon TV show
Eureeka’s Castle, which won an Ace Award for best children’s
program in 1990.
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| Such horrors await... |
Stine
also wrote the elder-teen horror series Fear Street, and due
to its success, he was asked to develop a horror series for younger
children. Getting the title from a TV station add in TV Guide, the
first Goosebumps book was Welcome To Dead House,
published in July of 1992. Though the series had been originally
aimed at girls (and Grrls, presumably), both boys and girls loved the
series, and Goosebumps took off. Stine would eventually write
a total of 62 original Goosebumps stories, with many spin-off series
following such as Tales To Give You Goosebumps, Give Yourself
Goosebumps, and Goosebumps HorrorLand, spun off from One
Day At HorrorLand in the original series.
The
Goosebumps stories were written specifically for younger
children, following child characters who found themselves in scary
situations with supernatural elements such as vampires, ghosts,
mummies, and other supernatural monsters. Stine says that he
intended for the stories to be funny as well as scary, and never puts
the kids in his books into situations that would be considered too
serious. In all of the Goosebumps books, the main characters
triumph over evil and use their own wits and imaginations to escape
the monsters.
The
popularity of the Goosebumps series brought about a children’s
TV anthology series, also called Goosebumps, that aired on Fox
Kids Network from 1995-98. Forty-three of the original stories were
adapted as episodes for this series. Many of the familiar characters
from the books, such as the HorrorLand Horrors, the Haunted Mask, the
Monster Blood, the Headless Ghost, and Slappy the living
ventriloquist’s dummy would appear in this series.
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| The 2015 movie |
The
legacy of Goosebumps is still loved today by adults who
remember reading the books growing up, and by children who are
introduced to it through libraries, school book clubs, and seeing
episodes of the TV series. In 2015, a Goosebumps feature film
was released, about a teenager (Dylan Minnette) who discovers that
his next-door neighbor is not only the author R.L. Stine (Jack Black,
appearing as a fictionalized version of Stine), but that all the
monsters from Goosebumps are real, trapped in the
books, and that Stine has been guarding the books to keep them
from being unleashed. Of course, all the monsters get loose, and
Stine and Zach must work together to save the town. A sequel,
Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, was released in 2018, with Jack
Black once again appearing as R. L. Stine, in which two young boys
again release the monsters of the Goosebumps series from an
unpublished Stine manuscript called Haunted Halloween. Both
would be great for a Halloween movie night, especially with young
kids.
So
that’s my installment, and here’s hoping you have a fun time,
with lots of goosebumps of your own, this Halloween! Come
back soon and see what we’ve got for our next post on the Thir13en
For Halloween!
Sincerely,
Francesca
“Frankie” Franken
MAD
DOCTOR’S NOTE: The Goosebumps books in all their various
permutations, and the Fear Street books (warning:
not for younger kids) are available for purchase on Amazon, or
probably for borrowing in your local library. The Goosebumps
TV series is available for streaming at Netflix, and both Goosebumps
movies are available at Amazon for purchase or rental (requires
Amazon Prime).
