Remember going to your elementary school library and hunting down the Goosebumps section to see the awesome cover art for the new book only to put it back on the shelf because you were too afraid to read it? Wait, maybe that last part was just me. The point is, if you were in an elementary school in the early ’90’s you knew what ‘Goosebumps’ was and now we still have a chance to see it on screen.
THR is telling us Disturbia and Red Dawn co-writer Neal Mortiz is giving the series a treatment for the big screen for Sony’s Columbia. Previously, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander of 1408 fame(?) tried adapting it to no fruition. The plan is to release a new family-friendly franchise based on the pre-teen horror novels. So yes, we could have a scary movie the whole family can gather around the theater or T.V. to watch.
For those who don’t know, it was a book series by child novelist R.L. Stine, published by Scholastic. The books have sold 300 million copies, second behind Harry Potter in franchise sales. As you can guess by the target audience, and even the publishers name, the stories are rather tame. Even though the stories may end in bleak uncertain peril, no one has been killed or even seriously injured in the whole series so it’s obvious there wont be much of that in the movie if it gets made.
Can the ‘Goosebumps’ stories translate well on the big screen?