Viewer beware, you’re in for a scare! With a trailer packed with jump scares and clear inspiration from some of our favorite R.L. Stine spine-tinglers, the new Goosebumps TV series is set to Slap(py).
Per the official synopsis, the upcoming show — which premieres on Disney+ and Hulu October 13 — follows “a group of five high schoolers [who] unleash supernatural forces upon their town … [and] must work together in order to save it.”
With Justin Long leading the cast as an English teacher who moves into an old haunted mansion, Goosebumps promises to bring the fear more than ever before.
Based on Stine’s best-selling YA series by the same name, Goosebumps first hit the screen in the mid-’90s with each episode centering around one book in the anthology series. Actors like Ryan Gosling and Hayden Christensen got their start on the show. Two decades later, Goosebumps got the big screen treatment with Jack Black starring as Stine in the 2015 Goosebumps movie, which was followed by Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, three years later.
Keep scrolling to find out everything to know about the new Goosebumps TV show:
When Does ‘Goosebumps’ Premiere?
Goosebumps premieres on Friday, October 13 — no coincidence that it’s a Friday the 13th! — on Hulu and Disney+.
Who Is Starring in the New ‘Goosebumps’ Series?
Long leads the cast as English teacher Nathan Bratt. The series also features Rachael Harris, Tyson Dornn, Ben Cockell, Isa Briones, Rob Huebel, Miles McKenna, Zack Morris, Ana Yi Puig and Will Price.
What Is the Synopsis of the Show?
When Long’s character moves into a haunted house, he’s in for the surprise of his life — as are a group of five teens, who look into the all-too-mysterious death of Harold Biddle, who died 30 years prior (and lived in the mansion). Like the tagline reads, “Scarier than you remember,” the trailer features plenty of heart-in-your-throat moments that call back to some of the best books in the series.
What ‘Goosebumps’ Books (and Characters) Will Be Referenced?
Considering the official poster for the series contains a creepy look at Slappy — the evil puppet from The Night of the Living Dummy books — fans can expect to see the wooden figure haunt his way through our cast of characters. The trailer centers around the spooky, predictive camera from Say Cheese and Die!, while the birdie from the Cuckoo Clock of Doom provides the perfect jump scare. Perhaps the most iconic of the original Goosebumps episodes, The Haunted Mask, will also play a role in the new series, as will the deep cut Go Eat Worms.
How Did R.L. Stine React to the New Adaptation?
“Getting an email from R.L. Stine after he watched the pilot saying he was thrilled with what we had done with his property was a true career highlight,” executive producer Conor Welch exclusively told Us Weekly in October 2023. “He was just always in the back of our mind. The bar was so high. So even though he wasn’t in the writers room with us, his presence was certainly looming.”
What Can ‘Goosebumps’ Readers Expect?
In October 2023, executive producer Pavun Shetty shared with Us about how the writers room approached telling the stories in a new way.
“We had access to all the books, which is great. It was a combination of picking some of the most popular titles, but more importantly picking stories that really dealt with the issues that the kids were feeling at the time because these were super emotional stories for our kids,” Shetty noted. “All of the stories are tied into what our characters are going through personally.”
He continued: “That makes them even more scary for our characters in the show and hopefully for the audience. I think one of the reasons that the book series is timeless is that R.L. Stine always started from a place of very relatable, tangible, evergreen sort of issues.”
What Message Is at the Center of the Show?
“Adolescents are going through alienation, heartbreak and identity. Those are just timeless things [and] it doesn’t matter if you went to high school in the ’90s or if you’re going to high school today,” Welch explained to Us. “When you add on top of that hauntings, horrors and scares that relate directly to those feelings and those issues, it just becomes a really fun [and] relatable experience.”
Shetty, for his part, hinted there was room for more episodes.
“We hope we get the opportunity because there’s so many more books to pull from. We used five of the most popular — and then there are little Easter eggs from other books. But there’s so much material to pull from [and] so many scary stories to pull from,” he hinted to Us. “We left the season open in a way that the character drama and the dynamic between our kids and our parents is still open. They started at one place and they ended at a totally different place. That brings up a whole new set of issues that we feel like we can follow with our core group going into subsequent seasons.”
