R.L. Stine was impressed by Goosebumps: The Vanishing – “It’s terrifying.”

In the same The Hollywood Reporter interview where he revealed that Netflix is developing three more Fear Street movies, author R.L. Stine also spent some time hyping up another streaming adaptation of his work: Goosebumps: The Vanishing. The second season of the new Goosebumps TV series, Goosebumps: The Vanishing is set to make its premiere on January 10th on Disney+ and Hulu – and Stine described this as an “elevated” Goosebumps that’s more terrifying than the source material.

The first season of Goosebumps centered on a group of five high schoolers as they embark on a shadowy and twisted journey to investigate the tragic passing three decades earlier of a teen named Harold Biddle — while also unearthing dark secrets from their parents’ past. The show is taking the anthology route, so we can expect a second season that has “an entirely new cast and setting based on Stine’s iconic Scholastic book series.” Season 2 will also consist of eight episodes, two shorter than the first season. Season 2 will pick up when teenage siblings discover a threat within their home, setting off a chain of events that unravel a profound mystery. As they delve into the unknown, the duo find themselves entangled in the story of five teenagers who mysteriously vanished in 1994.

The cast of Goosebumps: The Vanishing includes Arjun Athalye (Are You Afraid of the Dark?), Eloise Payet (The End of the Party), Christopher Paul Richards (The Kids Are Alright), Kyra Tantao (Zombies 3), Stony Blyden (American Born Chinese), and Sakina Jaffrey (Billions), and the only details that have been shared about their characters are their names. As Deadline reported, “Athalye plays Sameer; Payet is Hannah; Richards plays Matty; Tantao portrays Nicole; Blyden is Trey and Jaffrey portrays Ramona.” Also in the cast are Sam McCarthy (Dead to Me) and Jayden Bartels (Side Hustle) as fraternal twins Devin and Cece, respectively; Elijah Cooper (That Girl Lay Lay) as CJ; Galilea La Salvia (Party Down) as Frankie; Francesca Noel (R#J) as Alex; and Ana Ortiz (Devious Maids) as Jen, “a dedicated police detective who remains rooted in her Brooklyn neighborhood after experiencing a tragic event that involved her friends in adolescence.” Friends‘ David Schwimmer is also in there as Anthony, “a former botany professor and divorced parent of teenage girls who is juggling the responsibilities of overseeing an aging parent while having his kids for the summer.“ The twins Devin and Cece are the children of Schwimmer’s Anthony.

Rob Letterman, who directed the first Goosebumps movie, created this series with Nick Stoller, and Hilary Winston serves as showrunner on the new season. Stoller is executive producing the show through his company Stoller Global Solutions. Letterman and Winston are also executive producing Goosebumps alongside Neal H. Moritz and Pavun Shetty of Original Film, Conor Welch of Stoller Global Solutions, and Erin O’Malley. The show comes to us from Sony Pictures Television Studios.

Stine told The Hollywood Reporter, “When I write a Goosebumps book, that’s my most important thing, the twists and the shocks. Someone wrote a line that I wish I had written for the Goosebumps movie, where Jack Black played me, and at the very end, Jack is teaching a class, and he says, ‘Every story has a beginning, a middle and a twist,’ which perfectly describes [Goosebumps]. It perfectly describes it and it describes the TV show as well. I think they’re not predictable. So much of children’s literature is so linear, and so many horror movies, you know what’s coming. But I always try to have something that turns it all around that no one’s expecting. Another thing I like, and this is true to the books, [is that] the parent is always useless. In Goosebumps, either they don’t believe the kid or they’re not around and they don’t help.” When he sat down to check out Goosebumps: The Vanishing, Stine said, “I was kind of shocked at first to see all these teenagers walking around. But what they’ve done, they’ve made it older — high school kids — and they’ve hyped up the scares as well. It’s scarier. I just watched the first two episodes of the new season, and man, it’s very different, and it’s terrifying. The thing about Goosebumps is that no one ever dies. That’s the difference between Goosebumps and Fear Street [where] we kill off teenagers, right and left. We kill them all. Everyone loves it when you kill teenagers. There was a death in these first two episodes of the new [Goosebumps] season, but they have it happening 30 years ago. That’s a big difference. So it’s still Goosebumps. It’s just been elevated.“

Asked which Goosebumps book he would like to see receive the adaptation treatment in the future, Stine answered, “A Goosebumps book that nobody likes and no one’s ever interested in: Brain Juice. It’s about kids who drink this purple liquid and get smarter and smarter. They get too smart for everything. They get thrown out of school, they lose all their friends, and then they’re kidnapped by aliens, and on the way to the other planet, they get stupider and stupider. It’s my favorite Goosebumps book, but nobody knows it and it’ll never be adapted.“

Are you a Goosebumps fan, and are you looking forward to Goosebumps: The Vanishing? Let us know by leaving a comment below.