Trailer arrives for Goosebumps, starring Jack Black as R.L. Stine

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Given the fact that the first novel in R.L. Stine's GOOSEBUMPS series was published when I was just eight years old, the books probably should have had a place in my horror fandom, but I actually missed out on GOOSEBUMPS completely. I was already an established fan of horror movies when the GOOSEBUMPS books and their TV adaptations became popular, and I brushed them off as kid's stuff. I wanted more intensity from my horror than I felt stories aimed at children could deliver. Yeah, I was a preteen/tween horror snob.

GOOSEBUMPS is now getting the big budget, theatrical feature treatment, not with an adaptation of any specific book, but with a story that sort of covers the GOOSEBUMPS phenomenon as a whole:

In Goosebumps, 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.

It's like WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE meets JUMANJI.

With the film, which was directed by MONSTERS VS. ALIENS' Rob Letterman, set to reach theatres on October 16th, a trailer has now made its way online and can be viewed below. This is definitely a light-hearted adventure that won't be featuring any of that intense horror I wanted to see as a child, but it looks like it will be a fun movie for non-snobby kids to watch.