by Zakiyyah Madyun, Staff Writer

For this year’s SpookyJawn, I’ll be covering a series of adaptations that haunted my impressionable young mind and frequently appeared in my nightmares: Goosebumps. My credentials? A scavenged childhood book collection, several with holographic covers, an inherited VHS set to match, and a lifelong fear of Slappy (to be discussed).

R.L Stine is Stephen King for kids. He’s odd and potentially off-putting, and he’s written a suspicious number of paperbacks. His series Goosebumps, with its garish neon cover art and raised bubble lettering, contains over 200 books. These books are extremely successful and, since their inception in 1992, Stine has sold over 400 million copies. When I was eight years old, I read a lot of them.

Where there’s a successful children’s book series, there will almost always be a less-successful and potentially haphazard made-for-TV movie. For Goosebumps, this moment came in the form of an anthology series in 1995 that ran on Fox Kids. The introductory sequence features what appear to be some of the world’s first special effects, and I encourage you to take a look for yourself. I personally think the theme song is pretty good and I would give it three out of five Goosebumps.

Each episode starts in the style of The Twilight Zone or a similarly formatted Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Stein, dressed like an improv teacher in a sitcom, gives a stone-faced warning to viewers on the contents of the episode. As a kid, his pained look and unblinking gaze read to me as sincere, and I can happily say that I feel the same today. In the photo below, he’s getting ready to introduce a story called Welcome to Dead House.  

The story takes place in “Dark Falls,” a small and abandoned-looking midwestern town. Our young protagonists, Josh and Amanda Benson, are intuitively suspicious of the name. Mrs. Benson, dismissive of her children’s emotions, calls it “charming and evocative,” in my favorite one-liner of the story.

The family pulls up late afternoon to a house covered with overgrown weeds and leaves on a half-abandoned block. It conveniently has no electricity, creaky staircases and a mysterious figure haunting the top bedroom. One thing I appreciate about Goosebumps is how things look creepy in a fairly realistic way. The house is genuinely unsettling and the light switches are covered in grime. The casting of actual middle-school aged actors keeps things down to earth in our current era of Riverdale super-seniors.

The premise is as follows: some time ago, Dead Falls was an average working-class town, but an accidental chemical spill at the local factory took everyone out. Now, they haunt things and hunt their new neighbors for blood. They’re led by Compton Dawes, the Dark Falls realty agent, who looks airlifted from an entirely different community theater production.

Mrs. Benson accidentally protects Dead House with a wreath she hangs up on the wall. It’s been passed from “generation to generation” in her family and looks like a halo of expired potpourri. It also reads as a strangely complicated plot device for a 45-minute runtime. To be honest, Dead House has a lot of potential aside from its lackluster lead performances. The supporting characters, led by Dark Falls neighbor Mrs. Thurston, are campy in exactly the way Goosebumps should be. Thurston’s daughter Karen is another standout, with perfect 90s angsty delivery. A surprising amount of the Dark Falls teens are wearing Prohibition style fedoras, so collectively I can only give them one out of five Goosebumps.

There are a couple of things about Welcome to Dead House that stand out to me. The story sacrifices Petey, the family golden retriever, with a recklessness usually reserved for older audiences. I have to admit I caught myself feeling instinctually worried about him. He also put on a genuinely decent dog performance. The emotional manipulation his role evoked rivaled Anatomy of a Fall’s “Snoop.” If he’d had a better casting agent, could Petey have found his way to the Oscar’s circle? Another Goosebumps mystery without an answer.

Goosebumps is a series for kids after all, and at its core I can appreciate it for activating some real kid fears—in this episode in particular, the fear of having your feelings about major life changes dismissed, and not being taken seriously when something bad is happening around you. Moving to a new town and feeling nervous about making new friends are things that can ring true regardless of how old we are. For all of its campy delivery, Welcome to Dead House is a decently intriguing mess, deserving of three out of five Goosebumps in my book. I was not in for a scare, but I was in for a decent amount of suspense, which I think in this case is just enough.