We’ve been hearing some great things about the Goosebumps movie, and the latest trailer really supports that spooky-kooky-fun vibe, packed with monsters and laughs in equal measure. Not only does Goosebumps bring the creatures of R.L. Stine’s classic horror novels to life, but it also puts Stine himself in the center of it all in a metatextual monster mash.

Jack Black plays the film’s version of Stine, the author of the Goosebumps series of horror books for kids and young adults. When the new kid in town unwittingly opens one of Stine’s treasured novels, the fictional monsters within come to life and wreak havoc on their town:

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.

If you want to know more about the film, we had a chance to hang with Black and Stine himself on the set of Goosebumps, and you can read all about our spooky fun time here.

Goosebumps hits theaters on October 16.

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