As scholar Timothy Morris pointed out, in the 1990s the popularity and strong branding of Goosebumps “threatened to turn [it] from a series into a lifestyle.549 This “threat” was the whole point of the brand, as a statement on the creative direction of the franchise suggests: “We want to move away from focusing on characters and create a Goosebumps environment.”550 The way this was accomplished included flooding the market with merchandise and promotional tie-ins as well as expanding from paperbacks to other formats. Here, what stands out is what was left out: there were no special collector editions of the books, hardcover special or lengthened novels, there were no box sets of the show’s seasons, nor was there a theatrical feature. Cinema’s omission in particular is intriguing given children’s horror predecessors, and this and other format choices reveal the impact of the children’s horror film cycle and its negotiations.
Plans for a film were laid early on in the Goosebumps timeline, but the idea was never concretised because producers “never had the right idea.”551 Another reason why a Goosebumps movie may not
have thrived in the 1990s was the declining state of the children’s horror film cycle at that point in time. This suggestion gains strength particularly when one considers that the contents of a Goosebumps book are much closer to The Gate than they are to Casper. Scholastic might have succeeded in deflecting anxieties over the books with its reader-friendly campaign but would the same approach work for a theatrical adaptation? And what audience would this film court? The tendency was for youth-oriented horror films to include a layer for parents in the audience but how could Goosebumps achieve this without changing the core of R.L. Stine’s stories, where adult presence is very limited? Moreover, would such a move betray the pre-teen audience, who had so far been the exclusive target?
549 Morris, You're Only Young Twice: Children's Literature and Film, 66.
550 Mariam Mesbah, "New Scarier Goosebumps Products Target Boys," Kidscreen, http://kidscreen.com/1997/08/01/16023-19970801/#ixzz2Q4ZBFxYq.
551 Meredith Woerner, "Goosebumps Filmmakers Reveal How Rl Stine Became the Star of Their Movie," io9, http://io9.com/goosebumps-filmmakers-reveal-how-rl-stine-became-the-st-1700671432.
190 An audiovisual adaptation of the books was far from impossible, however, as the television series proved, suggesting that the deciding factor was not a question of adaptation but the hospitality of the medium, in this case television. Children’s television in the 1990s was in a process of transition, no longer confined to Saturday mornings but still mostly existing in the form of weekday afternoon and weekend block or dedicated cable channels. However, even if child viewers had schedule restrictions, they also had autonomy. A trip to the cinema required money, possibly a chaperone and always included the possibility of age-based restrictions for certain contents. Television, on the other hand, was not only at the child’s disposal in the family living room or even their own bedroom but it was also often recognized as a child-exclusive space. Particularly on Saturday mornings, early afternoons or other times of the day when adults are likely to be at work or otherwise occupied, the television and its surrounding space becomes an adult-free, child-dominated zone. Additionally, this situation could be entirely parent-approved: “When they were six and seven they discovered the Saturday morning cartoons. […] I can’t deny that this was great for us, because we’d be able to lie in bed nice and late while they watched their programs.”552
Television’s child-friendly characteristics were complemented further by its quality as a horror- friendly space in the 1990s. As described in chapter four, the mainstream horror films of the decade rebelled against the monster and gore trends of the 1980s, focusing on intellectual and adult- oriented fiction, thus generating a clear distinction between the contents found in feature films and those found in television. As cinema became a vehicle for prestige horror, the lower pressure environment of television became an inviting outlet for the other kinds of horror fiction, from the eerie mysteries of The X-Files to teenaged vampire slayers and their assorted monster friends — and, of course, Goosebumps. The link between television viewing, children’s culture and horror is also made clear within Goosebumps itself, as the characters watch late night monster movie
552 Marie Winn, The Plug-in Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life (New York; london: Penguin, 2002), 200.
191 marathons on television at each other’s house, browse the horror section at the video store, or suggest that their little sister “re-enact an X-Files episodes” with her dolls (Go Eat Worms). The preference for television over cinema was not unique to Goosebumps. Other child-oriented horror series were produced and became popular during this period, none ever expanding to the cinema. What we see, then, is a move from the cinema to television for the bulk of children’s horror texts of the 1990s. There are, moreover, parallels between the contents of these programmes that collectively set them apart from the children’s horror films of the same period: an absence of major adult characters or families so that complete narrative agency rests on the child (or child-like) main character, and strong aesthetic and thematic links to the horror genre that are not routinely sublimated by the use of comedy. There is a sense in which these non-theatrical texts almost seem to continue directly from the children’s horror films of the late 1980s, sharing strong narrative similarities with The Gate and Little Monsters (Richard Greenberg, 1989) and not much of the adult focus of Casper or The Witches. This implies that the dip in popularity of theatrical children’s horror was a result not of the trend’s cultural position but of the medium and its association with adult audiences.
This suggestion is supported by the other format choices in the Goosebumps franchise, namely the rejection of hardback editions over paperbacks. The decision is interesting not just because paperbacks were low prestige in and of themselves, cheap to produce and not very durable
(sometimes even disposable), but also because it is contrary to the new rules of children’s publishing of the 1990s, set by Harry Potter, a series so popular it was reissued as hardbacks with different covers for the children’s and adult markets. When questioned about this new status quo, R.L. Stine revealed his frustration and confessed that the industry’s shift “ruined publishing” for him.
“[Hardcovers] are all publishers want now. The monthly book series are over,” the author said.553 In
553 Doll, "R.L. Stine: The Lost Interview".
192 another recent interview, he has commented that children’s books “used to be a paperback
business. [...] They don’t want that, now it’s all hardcover series. And everything’s a trilogy.”554
It is curious, therefore, that Goosebumps did not attempt to adapt to the new standards. There was a single hardcover Goosebumps (a special commemorative edition for the series’ twentieth
anniversary) and only a handful of anthology books, all paperbacks. When Goosebumps 2000 was released the books were still paperbacks — a “relic”555 of different times, holding on to a “doomed” format.556 A self-declared “paperback guy,”557 R.L. Stine explains his fidelity to the format with child- centered arguments: “I like one a month; kids are waiting for the next one. I also liked it because kids could afford it. They’d come into a bookstore with five bucks and buy four different books.”558 Both of these arguments revolve around the child’s decisions and accessibility. The switch to hardcovers might have fitted with the industry’s trends but it may also have implied a loss of autonomy for the child, who would be forced to rely on an adult’s generosity in the form of a higher allowance or their approval of the chosen book in the form of a gift. In this way, not switching to hardbacks accomplished the same as not adapting for the cinema: it empowered the child to be in control of his own entertainment choices.
Additionally, the paperback and television formats enabled the complete exclusion of adults from the Goosebumps environment. The franchise was exclusive to children between the ages of seven and twelve. Even at the height of Goosebumps’s popularity, “not many people over 13 [knew R. L. Stine] except teachers, parents, booksellers and publishers,”559 and even these adult exceptions seemed to never fully immerse themselves in Goosebumps, instead perceiving it through the children they were close to: a mother who wrote to Stine saying she liked his books “because they
554 "R.L. Stine Has Been Giving Us Goosebumps for 20 Years". 555 Ibid.
556 "R.L. Stine: The Lost Interview". 557 Ibid.
558 "R.L. Stine Has Been Giving Us Goosebumps for 20 Years".
559 Mary W. Tabor, "At Home With: R.L. Stine; Grown-Ups Deserve Some Terror, Too," The New York Times, 7 September 1995.
193 give my kids shivers but not nightmares,”560 the radio interviewer who “actually did watch [The Haunting Hour]. Because I have ten year old boys,”561 or even one of Stine’s recent editors who claimed to knows his work “well” because “her ten-year-old son devours his books ‘like crack’.”562 As Atlantic contributing editor James Parker noted, “fourth grade — that’s the demographic bull’s- eye;”563 no one younger, no one older. The viability of such a product — horror exclusively aimed at children with little educational appeal beyond the encouragement of reading — is a testament to the deep cultural changes in American society. Even so, the difficulty in associating children’s horror with cultural prestige remains evidence of the persistence of some anxieties about controlling children.