by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched one of the most delightful recent
movies I’ve seen lately: Goosebumps, a
2015 production directed by Rob Letterman based on a story by Scott Alexander
and Larry Karaszewski (the duo who wrote the film Ed Wood) worked into a screenplay by Darren Lemke. Goosebumps began as a seemingly endless series of young-adult
horror novels by Robert Lawrence Stine, who signed them with his initials — R.
L. Stine — and who cranked out so many of them (25 in the Goosebumps series, plus 42 in the Give Yourself
Goosebumps series and eight more in a
series called Give Yourself Goosebumps Special Edition — and that’s only a fraction of his total output)
they ironically posed a problem for potential movie adapters: which
Goosebumps story do you film? The solution
Messrs. Alexander, Karaszewski, Lemke and Letterman hit on was to make it
metafictional, work R. L. Stine into the story as a key character (played by
Jack Black) and create a fictional device that would allow them to use all of the monster characters from the Goosebumps novels — or at least all the ones they wanted — in
the film. A widow named Gale (Amy Ryan) moves herself and her son Zach (Dylan
Minnette, one of those actors who isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but is cute and easy on the eyes) to the small town of
Madison, Delaware. She’s got a job as assistant principal of Madison High
School and she insists on driving her high-school-age son to school his first
day and even using her car’s automatic door locks to ensure he can’t leave the
car before she does. (Eventually she relents and gives him one minute on his own — which she counts down.) Gale has a
crazy sister, Lorraine (Jillian Bell), depicted as an aging hippie who didn’t
get the memo that the 1960’s were over, who also turns up in town. for its first
half-hour or so Goosebumps looks
like a pretty standard-issue alienated high-school student movie and one might
wonder what its connection was to a series of cheap young-adult horror novels
(which, at the series’ height in the 1990’s, were so ubiquitous you could
barely get into a supermarket check-out line without tripping over a display of
them). It turns out that Gale and Zach have a mysterious next-door neighbor who
has surrounded his house with a fence and issues Zach a strong warning that he
is never to cross the fence, and especially that his not to attempt to see or date his daughter
Hannah (a nicely wistful performance by Odeya Rush) … or else.
The neighbor is,
of course, Goosebumps author R.
L. Stine, and the gimmick that kicks off the movie is that the monsters
depicted in the Goosebumps books
are real, and only by putting locks on his bound original manuscripts and
keeping them in his home has Stine kept the monsters from escaping and wreaking
havoc on Madison (and, presumably, the rest of the world after that). Of
course, the inevitable happens: Zach and Champ (Ryan Lee) — the name is short
for “Champion” and of course is the object of derision from other students
(“Who has a name like ‘Champ’?” one of them asks — though I can think of at least
one prominent person named Champ: Champ Clark, who in 1912 was Speaker of the
U.S. House of Representatives and Woodrow Wilson’s principal rival for the
Democratic nomination for President that year — Charles guessed that Champ’s
first name was short for “Champlain” but it was really an abbreviation of his middle name: his full name was James Beauchamp Clark) —
sneak into Stine’s home, grab one of the manuscripts from his shelf and open
it. Immediately the monster trapped inside it, the Abominable Snowman of
Pasadena (the fact that the existence of the abominable snowman is attributed
to snowless Pasadena is an example of the camp spirit behind Stine’s books),
escapes and knocks all the other books to the floor, opening one and releasing
a particularly nasty ventriloquist’s dummy who becomes the film’s principal
villain. He releases all the other monsters from their books and burns the
manuscripts so they can’t be trapped in them again, and for the film’s
remaining hour the monsters — including such ripoffs from 1950’s films as a
blob and a giant-sized praying mantis, as well as a series of malevolent little
china elves and various other picturesque menaces — rampage through Madison
while Our Heroes figure out how to stop them. It seems the only way the rampage
will end is if they can prevail on R. L. Stine to write a new
Goosebumps book in which they all die,
whereupon they will instantly be summoned back into the manuscript and get
locked up in it again.
At first Zach offers to set Stine up on a computer, but
Stine protests that the magic will work only if he writes his new novel on the
same old Smith-Corona typewriter on which he wrote originally — which is in a
display case at Madison High School. Stine eventually more or less finishes the
book — though Zach has to type the last few pages to Stine’s dictation after
one of the monsters breaks Stine’s fingers — and the climax takes place on a
Ferris wheel in an abandoned amusement park (abandoned before it was even
finished because the developers ran out of money, though the place is still lit
so someone is paying its electric
bill). The Ferris wheel was set up early in the action when, on one of their
early dates, Hannah had Zach climb up it and sit in a car high above the city
even though the only way they can get down is to climb back down the way they
came up. (The director and writers have a panicked Zach ask, “How are we going
to get back down?” Then director Letterman does a jump-cut to them both walking
normally on the ground again, without showing us how they did get down.) In the climax, the Ferris wheel goes off
its moorings and starts revolving through town with its reluctant passengers
still aboard, and it ends after Stine finishes the manuscript and the monsters
get sucked back into it (“That book should be buried under a ton of concrete!”
said Charles, to which I replied, “What? And blow the possibility of a
sequel?”) with R. L. Stine hired by Madison High School as a substitute English
teacher. In a nice in-joke he greets “Mr. Black, the new drama teacher” in the
school’s hallway — Stine is played by Jack Black and Mr. Black, in a cameo, by
the real R. L. Stine — before showing up in class and beginning his lecture:
“There are three elements to every story: the beginning, the middle, and … the twist.” Our screenwriters then duly deliver the twist when
Stine’s typewriter starts typing, apparently by itself, and a voice announces
that there is one Goosebumps
monster, the Invisible Boy, who’s still alive because Stine forgot to write him
into the last novel.
There’s also a marvelous plot device in which it turns out
that Hannah doesn’t really exist — Stine wrote her and thereby conjured her
into existence because without someone to love, he was lonely — and Zach has a
crisis of conscience at the last minute because closing the book on the
monsters will mean closing the book on his girlfriend and making her cease to exist as well — until, in yet another twist
(the ending has more twists than a Red Vine!), Stine reveals that he wrote
Hannah in a separate book and therefore brings her to life again. Goosebumps is an absolutely marvelous film, to my mind the most
literate and genuinely funny horror-comedy since the original Ghostbusters (also a Columbia production, but made before Sony
bought the company), to which it owes quite a lot — as it does to The
Blob and Night of the Living Dead (Charles noted the deliberate parallel of having a
Black man barricade the door when the monsters attack the high school in the
middle of a big student dance). Combining horror and comedy would seem like a genre-bending natural, but there have been awfully few
great ones: The Bride of Frankenstein from 1935 (and the spoof of it, Young Frankenstein, from 1974), the Bob Hope-Paulette Goddard Ghost
Breakers from 1940, maybe a few of the
Abbott and Costello “monster” films, the original Ghostbusters … and now Goosebumps, which is essentially the Stranger than
Fiction concept applied to spoofing horror
and, while not quite on the level of Stranger than Fiction (when I reviewed that movie for imdb.com my headline
read, “Who would have thought Will Ferrell would be in a masterpiece?”), Goosebumps is screamingly funny and the monsters, realized
mostly with CGI (Sony Animation is listed as a co-producing company with
Columbia Pictures), are kept campily scary rather than truly frightening —
which is how this film got a PG rating instead of the PG-13 most horror films
aimed at the teenage audience get.
