Have you ever seen the Nancy Drew movie? You should. It’s fun. I have a copy.
The Goosebumps movie is like the Nancy Drew movie. I mean that in the sense that it’s a fun movie. The person who wrote the screenplay (Darren Lemke) did a good job creating a children’s movie that has an appropriate pace, likable (if a little bland) protagonists, quirky secondary characters that only add to the movie and don’t take away from it, and a fairly convincing villain. The jokes are at worst passable and at best genuinely chuckle-worthy. Jack Black turns in a surprisingly good performance with the character of R.L. Stine, a curmudgeonly author who has shut the world out because it’s safer for him and for the world. I can’t remember the last time Jack Black was funny, but he’s funny here, although not in every scene.
Let it not be said that the Goosebumps movie is a bad kid’s movie. It isn’t. It’s actually a pretty good one.
But so is the Nancy Drew movie, and here’s where things go wrong. I’ve never read a Nancy Drew book and know nothing about her as a character. The Nancy Drew series doubtlessly has a devoted group of followers who know the ins and outs of the title character, her friends and enemies, her most essential adventures. I find it hard to imagine that the Nancy Drew movie much resembles the Nancy Drew books. I doubt that the literary Nancy Drew has a wisecracking kid following her around who has the hots for her but is too young for her to take him seriously or that she is surrounded by people who find her doo-good nature incompatible with the contemporary world. What the Nancy Drew movie really does is pose the question of what would happen if the literary Nancy Drew found herself in 21st century America. (I guess.)
Like I’ve said, the movie is a lot of fun. But it’s easy to see why Nancy Drew devotees wouldn’t like it. It isn’t really a *Nancy Drew* movie. It doesn’t reward people who are familiar with the Nancy Drew series. At best, it looks past them, and at worst, it ignores them completely. At least I think so. Again, I’ve never read those books.
But I certainly HAVE read Goosebumps. Lots and lots of them. As such, I have the ethos to say that the Goosebumps movie is better if you’re only casually familiar with the series and probably best if you know almost nothing about it. The bare bones (R.L. Stine is an author who’s written famous scary books for kids) is the amount of knowledge that you need as a set-up. Everything after that becomes a burden because you realize quickly that this movie wasn’t made for Goosebumps fans.
What is most likely is that Lemke (who by all accounts seems to know his way around a kid’s movie) skimmed through the series, taking what he thought seemed interesting and leaving the rest behind. Whether he believed that he was making Goosebumps fans happy in doing so isn’t really important. And yes, adaptation theory and the fantasy of an “original” text and such. Whatever. Let me rant about this. You don’t use adaptation theory in your real life anyway.
The Goosebumps movie contains elements of Goosebumps-ness, but it isn’t for Goosebumps fans. There are times when it’s clear that the movie directly mirrors the books (the absurd jump scares that mirror Stine’s “each chapter has a cliffhanger” gimmick), but the structure of the movie isn’t something you’d ever find in one of Stine’s books. The Goosebumps movie ultimately revolves around the romantic relationship of two high-schoolers, culminating in them kissing; there is no Goosebumps book to my knowledge that contains a single romantic kiss. A father figure who has to conquer his fears is the other major plot line, and this too is not found anywhere in Goosebumps. Any kid who saw this movie and looked to the book series would be very disappointed on the level of plot.
What that kid would find in the Goosebumps, of course, is monsters. The monsters are what is supposed to make this a *Goosebumps* movie. Of course, there are something like 150 Goosebumps books (probably more than that), plus a TV show, so there are way too many monsters for one movie.
(Oh, wait. The TV show. Let me ask a question. Why didn’t Danny Elfman, this movie’s one holdover from the time Tim Burton was supposed to direct it, incorporate the memorable theme from the TV show into his score? We were all waiting for that.)
There are too many monsters. Writing the Goosebumps movie was no easy task, and Lemke does a really good job setting it up. Instead of trying to tell one of the stories from one of the books (which one do you pick?), he tells a totally new story ABOUT the books, with the author, himself an integral part of the brand, as one of its main characters. Really clever. Even more clever is how Lemke makes the presence of multiple monsters a necessary part of the plot rather than a bunch of flimsily tied-in cameos.
There are two governing plots of the movie, as I’ve said. One of them the generic “boy meets girl, conflict, triumph, smooch.” The other is about Stine himself. In the movie universe, Stine’s monsters are actually real. He created them out of some sort of all-powerful rage when he was teased as a child, and he keeps them captive in the books he writes by means of a lock and key. Each original manuscript is literally locked to keep the monsters from escaping. Opening the book releases the monster. If this happens, Stine has to track down the monster, re-book it, and move somewhere else. He lives under a fake name and doesn’t let his daughter interact with any other kids. (In the best twist of the movie, his daughter turns out to be Hannah, the ghost from The Ghost Next Door. It’s not really fun if you haven’t read that book. These are the kinds of moments that Goosebumps fans were waiting for, and there are far too few of them.)
The two plots meet each other when the movie’s protagonist accidentally lets loose one of the monsters, the Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, who is basically just a giant snow-ape. This would be fine for the characters (Stine captures the monster soon enough), except that, in the initial scuffle with the snow-ape, the kids (the two main ones, plus a cowardly sidekick) unknowingly unlock another book: Night of the Living Dummy. Slappy, the evil ventriloquist dummy from that book, understands what being free means (unlike the snow-ape) and is looking for a way to NOT have to be trapped on Stine’s bookshelf for eternity. In order to ensure his continued freedom, he unlocks a bunch of the other books and then burns them, which means that the monsters he releases cannot be re-booked.
This is a pretty brilliant way to set up all of the monster cameos. Slappy is the right choice for a manipulative monster overlord; this totally seems like something he’d do. And because it’s an organic part of the overall story, the movie allows itself to throw in whatever monsters it wants without their presence seeming forced. Suddenly, all of the monsters from the series are on the table, and the viewer doesn’t have to worry about them fitting into the story individually. It’s exactly what the movie needed to do to give itself license to give Goosebumps fans what we all really wanted all along, which was an ensemble cast of the series’ coolest and most memorable monsters. Truly impressive writing.
But after that, everything goes to hell. The biggest problem with the Goosebumps movie, much bigger than all of the ones I’ve outlined, is that it uses the wrong monsters. The monsters are really the heart of the movie. Every movie that strives to represent a niche has to, in addition to making an objectively decent movie that appeals to all moviegoers, reward those who belong to the niche, and I mean reward in the literal sense. They should give people who were already familiar with Goosebumps little “gifts”: in-jokes, cameos, catchphrases, things like that. There should be moments where people who are familiar with the source material get it” and people who aren’t familiar with the source material don’t. That’s how you reward the true fans. Nudge, nudge, they say to each other. It’s that thing from that one book! Awesome! And then they high five over their handmade popcorn tub with the hamster from Monster Blood II on it. It’s a sincere moment of human beauty.
But those moments barely exist in the Goosebumps movie. Someone who isn’t familiar with Goosebumps comes away with almost exactly the same experience as someone like myself, which, in its own way, means that they come away with a better one. With the framework admirably established, this movie lives and dies by the monsters it selects for inclusion. It is here that the Goosebumps movie fails, and it fails grossly.
There are certain monsters that fans of the series know are automatically going to be in the movie. These are the big ones: Slappy, the Haunted Mask, some iteration of Monster Blood, the praying mantis from A Shocker on Shock Street, the Horrors from HorrorLand, the scarecrow from The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, etc. The biggies. These are the iconic monsters of the series. The first major failing of the Goosebumps movie on a monster-level is that only some of these monsters appear. All of them should appear, even if in some instances only for a second. That the movie does not mention HorrorLand (even though it has AN AMUSEMENT PARK IN IT ANYWAY) seemed like the biggest oversight to me, especially since there’s a video game about it and the book series that bears its name is still going. But, it appears that they may be making a separate movie just about HorrorLand, so we’ll let that go.
Regardless, not all of these monsters are in the movie, and they all should be. That’s major mistake #1. Major mistake #2 really highlights how little Lemke actually knows about the Goosebumps series. There were multiple times (at least four) that I had no idea where the monster that was on the screen came from. If I can’t identify the monster as a Goosebumps monster, that’s a problem. In part, this is because some of the monsters are from the newer books (I’ll talk about that in a second), but in part it’s because some of them are from moments so obscure that no Goosebumps fan could feel the thrill of saying “There’s that monster!” One of them is from the 14th book in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. I swear that’s true. My heart really sank when I saw monster after monster appear on the screen that I didn’t recognize. This is supposed to be the movie’s calling card. It was quite a disappointment.
And it’s not just that the monsters that the movie uses aren’t the RIGHT ones. It’s that they are the WRONG ones. They not only don’t represent the series itself properly but they actually downplay its creativity, presenting to the world a version of Goosebumps that lacks one of its most important features: its originality. The original Goosebumps series cornered the market on things like evil ventriloquist dummies, murderous scarecrows, masks that attack you, and haunted cameras. Name a canonical evil scarecrow. You can’t. And yet you are familiar with the idea. Stine did those things. The majority of the original series also does a really remarkable job avoiding some of the most cliché categories or monsters. There are no zombies, no versions of Frankenstein’s monster, no possessed babies or toddlers, (almost) no vampires, no little green aliens (although there are a ton of other kinds). For a series of horror books, this is a truly impressive feat. The genius of Stine is his ability to create convincing horror stories that revolve around evil garden gnomes and sponges.
(Okay, so there’s technically one vampire, but it’s at the end of the series, and it doesn’t really count. It doesn’t COUNT. Because he’s a count! Count Nightwing. Wow, I’m hilarious.)
Which is why it’s so disappointing that Lemnke chose to populate the Goosebumps movie with many of those cliché monsters, as well as an evil poodle. Yes, all of the monsters do technically come from the books. But the zombies are such a recent addition (in the last year!) that most Goosebumps fans won’t see them as Goosebumps-ian. And, honestly, they aren’t. Stine’s been at this since 1992. He’s running out of ideas. The same is true with the deathray aliens, vampires, evil robot toys, and Murder the Clown, my least favorite monster of the whole movie because his name actually IS “Murder the Clown.” You know, just in case you doubted my theory that Stine is running out of ideas. These monsters don’t represent Goosebumps. Zombies and evil clowns aren’t Goosebumps. They’re generic. What’s the point of having a Goosebumps movie if it doesn’t use the series’ unique characters? A movie about aliens and evil toys is barely a Goosebumps movie at all.
And that’s my verdict on the Goosebumps movie. It isn’t truly a Goosebumps movie at all. If you go in hoping that it will be a good movie, you’ll be pleased. If you expect it to be a Goosebumps movie, your heart will be crushed like a jack-o’-lantern in the wake of a group of stereotypical Halloween bullies.
Postscript:
I’ve softened on it since I saw it first in 2015, in part because the initial anger and disappointment have faded a bit. It’s a good movie, so if you have the right expectations for it, you’ll enjoy it. After 6 viewings of it, I’m no longer surprised by its decisions to use some of the wrong monsters, and I’ve gotten over myself enough to recognize that 80% of the monsters who get major screentime are Goosebumps originals. Murder the Clown only appears in three scenes. Almost all of the set pieces center around major Goosebumps monsters. I’m NOT over it, to be clear, but I’m no longer actively fuming about it. It isn’t the movie that any true Goosebumps fan would have made, but I may have oversold how little it has to do with Goosebumps. I actually kind of majorly oversold it. I stand by what I said, but I think maybe the Goosebumps movie deserves a little more credit and a little less venom than I gave it.
blood bank blues 