Everything You Need To Know About The New Goosebumps Series, Plus Its Surprising Parallel To Gen V!
Everyone has some type of memory connected to the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine, who still continues to write them now after the book series debuted in 1992. Fans got to enjoy the Goosebumps anthology TV series in 1995, followed by two movies in 2015 and 2018. Now Disney+ is bringing the franchise back for a new audience, but instead of an anthology, we’re following a group of teens who are dealing with horrors of their parents past — including handling terrifying artifacts like The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, The Haunted Mask, the Say Cheese and Die camera, worms from Don’t Eat Worms, and of course Slappy himself. Kristen Maldonado of Pop Culture Planet spoke with executive producers of the series Conor Welch and Pavun Shetty about how they chose the books to focus on, Easter eggs, and the surprising parallel to Gen V.
For Conor Welch, the Goosebumps books were the first ones to make reading enjoyable. “I was a huge fan of the Goosebumps books growing up. They were in fact the first series that made reading feel fun as opposed to like a task that my parents or my teachers made me do,” he told me. “I piled through them as a kid in the 90s and now my oldest daughter is in the middle of them too. She can’t get enough. Huge, huge fan and exciting to watch my kids become fans as well.”
Meanwhile Shetty felt like he was doing something rebellious reading the books. “I used to steal them from my sister's bookshelves, so I felt like I was reading something that I shouldn't be allowed to read, which made them even scarier. I loved the books growing up and I also watched the original series too, so I grew up a Goosebumps fan,” he shared. Then it was sort of fortuitous that the company I started working with also did the first Goosebumps movie and the second one, so it really came full circle when we got the opportunity to make this into a TV show.”
Even Rob Letterman, the director of the 2015 movie, is a co-creator of this new TV series. But how do you create a different project using the same same source material? “When Rob and I started talking about doing this as a TV show, we knew we wanted to do something that took the iconic stories and do an elevated take on them,” said Shetty. “It was important to us that the show be super funny and dramatic and scary, but still honor the original source material.”
The next challenge was choosing which quintessential Goosebumps stories to start with. “It was important to us that this series unlike the previous was not anthological, so that there was one sort of mystery that took our same characters through the arc of the entire first season. So the architecture of that season is the first five episodes follow each of our five main high school characters who are also haunted by a totem from one of five of the more popular books. We landed on these five because the very relatable nugget, the issue that each of these kids are dealing with that kind of elevate to the horrific place, are very interesting relatable character traits. For Isaiah (Zack Morris), it was the weight of the world on his shoulders, financial burden. He has to be a football star. To get a Polaroid camera that pops out a photo that shows that he's injured and maybe can't play football anymore, that's a really exciting way to launch into to a season,” said Welch. “Each of those books had super relatable character issues that we thought would be fun to play with.”
Shetty added: “You'll see that we're dealing with five different books, but there's stuff pulled from all of the books throughout the entire season. There's a lot of Easter eggs for Goosebumps fans like you that if you read all the books, you'll see different elements and different characters from a lot of the books that populate the entire show.”
What’s interesting is that at first these totems are embraced by the characters and make their lives easier. “That happens in the third episode with our character James (Miles McKenna). James is a super popular, funny kid, class clown, but we learned that his issue is that he doesn't really know who he is as a person. He's a little bit of a chameleon and he actually uses the cuckoo clock to his advantage. He finds out that there's different versions of himself running around once this cuckoo clock starts working. He actually tries to embrace that and use that to his advantage, but it also plays upon his core insecurity which is not knowing who he is as a person and having a lot of different personalities,” revealed Shetty. “Same with Isaiah with the haunted camera and [Isabella] (Ana Yi Puig) in the second episode who finds the haunted mask. [It] gives her courage that she doesn't usually. The totems really hang on to our character's core issue and then magnify them.”
The most important thing when putting this cast together was finding actors who could handle the balance of comedy and horror. “All of the actors that we cast had real comedy chops, could really land a joke, exceptional timing, but also drama to play the nuance of being scared or of being in secure or you know just basically be able to personify all of those high school issues coming to the surface,” said Welch. “Then Justin Long being one of the first that we cast who resume includes just the funniest movies and television shows of all time, as well as some of the scariest. Like he was just coming off of Barbarian when we cast him in this so he hit that you know narrow purple in the Venn Diagram of very funny and knows horror very well. Rob Huebel and Rachael Harris as well come from a comedy world, but really have great drama chops.”
Welch added: “Then for the five high school students, it was mostly unknowns or relative unknowns. I think a lot of people are going to discover these actors here. We auditioned literally hundreds of kids and these five rose to the top and were just so exceptional an immediately created a chemistry that was really fun to watch. Hopefully, we'll get to see play out for many seasons to come.”
The big return they teased? Slappy, of course! “I know a fan favorite character is Slappy and we can say that Slappy does make an appearance in a very unexpected way about midway through the season,” revealed Welch. But with so many murderous dolls on the loose from Chucky to M3GAN, what makes Slappy stand the test of time? “I think he’s the OG,” said Welch, with Shetty adding: “Just seeing that jaw unhinge every single time and talk. Being so sinister while also looking so rudimentary but like put together is always scary. Throughout all of those dolls, I think Slappy is the scariest. Seeing [his] eyes go to the side while [his] head is staying still is always the scariest.”
Welch gave R.L. Stine a major kudos for making every day items totally terrifying. “Stine did an incredible thing — which I think is a huge reason for why the books are so resonant, so popular, and so timeless — which is start with everyday relatable things that people will see throughout their life, throughout their day, in their house out in the world,” he said. “Whether it's a camera or worms or a cuckoo clock or a doll and then elevate those to a super, super scary place. It all starts in that familiarity and then turning it on its head a little bit, which hopefully we captured in the series as well.”
In addition to the heighted world of Goosebumps, Shetty also worked on the brand new The Boys spin-off Gen V. “That takes place in college, which college issues are very specific on their own, […] where superheroes are taught how to be good people [but] in reality they're actually the worst of the worst. We’re dealing with high school issues in Goosebumps which are even scarier in my opinion than college issues,” he said. “Even though the tone of Goosebumps is very different than the tone of Gen V, I think what they have in common is that they're both mashups of comedy, of horror. There's a lot of adventure in both of them and they really deal with these issues that kids in those various time frames of their lives face.”
Both shows deal with the kids struggling with the dark mistakes their parents made. “A lot of times, growing up, you have to deal with what your parents did before you and you have to deal deal with the ramifications of that. In Gen V, this is the first generation of superheroes that learned that they were injected with Compound V. They weren't born superheroes. Their parents made them like that even though that was a horrific experience growing up. In Goosebumps what we're going to learn in series is that what our kids are dealing with in the show is actually a direct result of something that their parents did while they were in high school. They're dealing with the sins of their parents in a very different way. In Goosebumps, we actually follow their parents back when they were in high school in the 90s too and draw a direct line between something they did that our kids are dealing with now.”
Shetty continued: “A lot of times kids, whether you're in high school or in college, you have to take issues into your own hands. You can't rely on anyone else, especially your parents who are just as flawed as kids are many times. There's a lot of parallels between both shows there.”
Reader beware, you’re in for a scare as Goosebumps drops episodes weekly on Disney+.
