If you were a child of the 90’s, there’s little doubt you at least read a few pages of R.L. Stine‘s popular book series Goosebumps. Amounting to nearly 200 books, there’s virtually every flavor of scares to be had and now Hollywood is trying their hand at an adaptation. In the works for nearly two decades (even including an iteration from Tim Burton), it’s finally coming to the big screen thanks to Rob Letterman, reteaming with his Gulliver’s Travels star Jack Black.
“It’s the number one reason I went to Jack,” Letterman tells Collider, discussing the film’s tone of scary fun. “He’s one of the few guys who can do that and I kind of leaned on him pretty heavily to help me navigate that. Because I want it to be scary when it’s scary. You don’t want to undermine the tension of it, but at the same time after you get the scare out you have to have levity and it has to be funny to build up for the next moment. So it’s just balancing. There’s a lot of action, there’s a lot of adventure, there’s a lot of scares, there’s a lot of comedy – it’s a mashup of all those things and I didn’t want it to feel disconnected. There had to be one tone, so he really helps me steer through that.”
Also starring Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush, Amy Ryan, Ryan Lee, and Jillian Bell, check out the trailer and poster below.
Upset about moving from a big city to a small town, teenager Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) finds a silver lining when he meets the beautiful girl, Hannah (Odeya Rush), living right next door. But every silver lining has a cloud, and Zach’s comes when he learns that Hannah has a mysterious dad who is revealed to be R. L. Stine (Jack Black), the author of the bestselling Goosebumps series. It turns out that there is a reason why Stine is so strange… he is a prisoner of his own imagination – the monsters that his books made famous are real, and Stine protects his readers by keeping them locked up in their books. When Zach unintentionally unleashes the monsters from their manuscripts and they begin to terrorize the town, it’s suddenly up to Stine, Zach, and Hannah to get all of them back in the books where they belong.
Goosebumps opens on October 16th.