NYCC 2023: ‘Goosebumps’ Reanimates In A New Series On Hulu And Disney+
by Anton Kromoff
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In the early 90’s I got my hands on one of the first Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine. As a weird kid who liked monsters and mystery, they struck an immediate chord with me. Normally, I start things at the beginning, but there were a few books out at this point, so my first venture into this spine-tingling series was Monster Blood. With old toy stores, giant dogs, growing green slime, scared kids who have to save the day, and a witch named Sarabeth, the book was an instant delight. At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on.
It was not long before I grabbed every Goosebumps book I could come across, often swapping out the one I had just finished for whatever new one I found at the used book store. Menacing Garden Gnomes, cameras that showed you your doomed fate, and ventriloquist dummies with an evil streak a mile long were but a small fraction of the ever-expanding loosely connected horror universe spreading out before me like the iconic green growing goo that would soon consume everything in sight.
The newest version of this series has been reanimated and launched across both Disney+ and Hulu on Friday, Oct. 13. The series follows a group of five high schoolers in the small, yet oddly cozy, town of Port Lawrence. They unearth dark secrets linked to the tragic passing of a teen boy named Harold Biddle, who has ties to their parents from three decades earlier. After throwing a Halloween party in the old Biddle house, these teens find themselves in a new haunted reality where they must band together to save the town, learning new things about each other and their parents along the way.
There have been attempts in the past to capture the tone of this series in film, and some of them have been fun, but this most recent offering took me back to those good old days when I hid under the covers with a flashlight reading those pulp-paged books and diving deep into a world where we did not always win against the strange forces that would conjure from this world or the next.
Until next time, you can catch up on the series now at Hulu and Disney+. I will have episode reviews incoming as we enter a window that feels like it has given all you wonderful readers enough time to dive in before the spoilers roll out.
