Goosebumps

‘Loki’ is back and ‘Goosebumps’ is here.

Or Huluween, if you will.

R.L. Stine’s beloved book series returns to TV.

The new ‘Goosebumps’ is being developed by Scholastic, Neal H. Moritz, and Sony.

It may be hard to believe now, but there was once a time when studios would wait until a release had proven itself at the box-office before investing in a massive franchise around it. But the likes of DC, Marvel, and the future firee at Universal who came up with the Dark Universe boondoggle have now set a standard of placing the cart before the horse, and other studios cannot help but follow suit. Fox is the latest showbiz entity to go all-in on an untested concept, banking that the respectable profits generated by that Goosebumps movie from 2015 that you’ve already forgotten about shall be a bellwether for future riches.

The success of Hotel Transylvania 2 proved that family-friendly horror-themed movies stand to make a whole bunch of cash when released in the vicinity of Halloween. Now, Goosebumps is here to ensure that we’ll be getting slightly scary kids’ movies every October for the foreseeable future. The adaptation of the popular book series opened at number one, riding a wave of nostalgia and family appeal to a very strong start, beating out some pretty serious competition.

Film critics, on average, know less about children and their pop culture taste than just about any social group on the planet. So the next sentence of this review should be taken with several coarse grains of sodium chloride.

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.

In a large soundstage complex in Conyers, Georgia – a quick ride from downtown Atlanta – a crew of lurching, hobbling, and otherwise swaying monsters mill about, as casually as a pack of monsters possibly can. Some of them are getting their pictures taken for production stills. Others are waiting to shoot a scene. A few are even partaking in the offerings available at the craft services table. But there are a lot of them, and they're all here for Rob Letterman's live-action Goosebumps movie, a family-friendly feature kitted out with all sorts of freaks and creeps, all the better to bring R.L. Stine's intensely popular book series to terrifying (and, if the film is successful, also very funny) life.

It's surprising that it's taken this long for R.L. Stine's Goosebumps to make it to the big screen, but at last someone found an inventive way to pull it off. The first trailer for the upcoming film has arrived, featuring Jack Black in the meta-role of Stine himself, whose novel creations come to life and wreak havoc on a group of teens.