Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Goosebumps’ on Hulu, A Creepily Funny Re-hash of The ‘90s Horror Show That Terrified A Generation

R.L. Stine has been synonymous with kids horror for nearly four decades thanks to his Goosebumps book series. Though his stories have been translated to the screen already, in a mid-1990s series that read as a Twilight Zone for kids and a 2015 Jack Black film, the newest series, which premieres on Disney+ and Hulu this week, is a modern update featuring ten episodes that all interconnect the lives of a group of teens who are now paying for a terrible secret harbored by their parents for 30 years. Darkly funny and just as spooky, it’s a welcome addition to the Halloween canon.

GOOSEBUMPS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: It’s 1993. We know this because it says so onscreen, but also because R.E.M.’s “Drive” plays as a young man named Harold Biddle walks from school back to his home. Once he arrives to the empty house, Harold heads to his basement where he settles in for the afternoon to draw in a sketchbook and take creepy Polaroids of a mask he has on display. Afternoon turns to dusk and when Harold goes to answer a knock at the door, no one is physically there, but a spirit enters the house and soon the place is enveloped in a fire with the teen inside.

The Gist: The opening scene of the new Goosebumps series sets up what you need to know for the rest of the episode and season, which takes place thirty years later in the same town, Port Lawrence, and features students who attend the same high school as Biddle, Port Lawrence High. In the present day, our story focuses on Isaiah (Zack Morris), a star quarterback at the school who is failing history class and won’t be allowed to play ball unless he aces the next test. His friend and neighbor Margot (Isa Briones) lets him cheat off of her, and it’s clear she will do anything for him, to the dismay of his actual girlfriend, Alison. When Isaiah’s friends decide to throw a Halloween party, he suggests holding it at the Biddle house, which wasn’t completely destroyed in the fire, but has been vacated since Harold’s death in 1993.

The house is not completely abandoned though: Nathan Bratt, played by Justin Long, will be moving to town to live in what’s left of the home soon enough. After young Harold Biddle died in the basement of the home, his parents disappeared, and Mr. Bratt was the closest living Biddle relative, so he inherited the place. When Isaiah and his friends arrive to the house for their party, Isaiah finds Harold Biddle’s old Polaroid camera in the basement and takes a couple of photos of his friends before the party begins. As the party is in full swing, Mr. Bratt shows up to break it up, and the students all scatter. Alison runs off alone into the woods, and while she’s there she sees a vision of Harold Biddle, his body burning in flames, and she slips and falls. The next day, Margot sees Biddle’s silhouette in the hallway of the school and she simultaneously has an allergic reaction that causes her to nearly choke.

Isaiah finds the Polaroid photos of Alison and Margot in his backpack, but the photos are not from the party, they depict both of the young women in distress, Alison lying in the woods after having seen Harold, and Margot choking. Isaiah becomes convinced the camera is haunted and that whoever appears in a photo will have something bad happen to them. When his friend James takes a photo with the camera, it shows Isaiah lying on the ground. Thanks to Margot’s test answers, Isaiah is allowed to play at his big football game that night, but during the game, he falls to the ground and breaks his arm. His season and his chance to be scouted for college are now over.

Nora (Rachael Harris), who is the mother of Lucas (Will Price), one of Isaiah’s classmates, takes Isaiah’s father Ben aside at the hospital to tell him what she thinks is really going on: the ghost of Harold Biddle is back, and he’s seeking revenge on the children of his own former classmates. “I saw Biddle,” she says. “He’s come back, Ben. He’s come back to make us pay for what we did to him.” Just what Nora, Ben, and their friends did though, remains a mystery which will unravel over the course of the next nine episodes.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Despite the fact that they’re both based on R.L. Stine’s book series, Goosebumps has less in common with its 1990s-era predecessor of the same name than it does moody, murder-y teen thrillers like Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Cruel Summer.

Our Take: Developed by Nicholas Stoller (who is responsible for directing comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and co-writing The Muppets) and Rob Letterman, who previously directed the Jack Black-led Goosebumps film, this new Goosebumps is filled with modern, clever jokes and entertaining performances that seem directed not just at the teen audience the show seems to appeal to, but their parents, too. The fact that it begins in 1993, when many of us parents would have been in high school just like Harold Biddle (and would have been listening to R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People on repeat) is the first hint that this show was made partially by and for Gen X, the first generation that also grew up reading Goosebumps books. It also helps that performers like Long, Harris, and Rob Huebel, have been cast to add some humor and name recognition, especially for us oldies watching.

While the show feels akin to Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin with regard to the sins of the parents being visited on their children, it also pays homage to its source material: most of the episodes are updates of classic Goosebumps stories, like The Haunted Mask and The Cuckoo Clock of Doom. As each episode unravels and offers the sequence of events that transpire from a different character’s point of view (each one tinged with an odd supernatural event), we learn more about the mystery that currently plagues the town, as well as the events that led to it. While there’s no shortage of fantasy anthology series out there, Goosebumps is set apart has a narrative woven throughout, isn’t just standalone stories, but an anthology-meets time jumps-meets Rashomon show where everyone has a different story to tell as the mystery unfolds.

As we all reach for the remote in search of Halloween frights this month, Goosebumps offers a smart, well-crafted way to scratch that itch we all get for the small screen scaries.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: [SPOILER ALERT} Mr. Bratt sits in his new home when the fire in the fireplace goes out. Thinking it’s the local teens playing a prank, he gets up to investigate and is faced instead by Harold Biddle’s spirit, which goes up in a puff of smoke and enters Bratt’s body. Bratt smiles slyly, now possessed by Biddle, as Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps” starts to play.

Performance Worth Watching: Long is great as Mr. Bratt, a 40-something English teacher trying to be cool and hip to appeal to his teenage students, who also happens to be possessed.

Memorable Dialogue: “Um, what if this place is, like, actually haunted?” Alison asks when she enters the Biddle house. Like, it totally is.

Our Call: STREAM IT! While the ’90s version of Goosebumps was geared toward pre-teens and had a spooky-but-still-sorta-cheesy vibe in the way that ’90s syndicated programming often did, this version is updated with interesting plots, clever dialogue, and lots of pop culture references. While some pre-teens will enjoy it, it feels like the target audience skews a touch older thanks to some genuine creepiness throughout.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.