Season 1 of Goosebumps.

Goosebumps is sort of a pride and joy of my childhood, because back in third grade I challenged myself to read every single Goosebump book over summer vacation. And you know what? I did. Every single last one that was in print by 1997, that’s more than 60 books over summer vacation.

The old Goosebumps show is uh…not great. Even by kid’s TV standards a lot of the episodes were just downright terrible owing to the bottom of the barrel child actors and thirty cents in budget they gave the crew. Also many of the stories just work better on print. Goosebumps back when was always better in the noggin of a child where imagination could ferment a moderately spoopy story into something of nightmares. The Jack Black movies were pretty good. Are You Afraid Of The Dark was always the superior show.

This being 2023, the new rendition of Goosebumps is of course a full story rather than a collection of shorter disconnected tales. It tells the tale of Harold Biddle who mysteriously dies in a housefire that isn’t that mysterious at all really. A group of teenagers work together to uncover the mystery of why the town is haunted and spoopy stuff keeps happening to them.

Season 1 premiered on October 13 with five episodes of ten, and I’m going to talk about all of them starting with the original five and continuing as new episodes come out. As always, expect spoilers.

#1-5: The Premiere Episodes

The first positive you’ll note about this show is that it has a much higher budget than the 1995 series did. The actors involved are actual actors, and the showrunners seem to actually care about the show being good. Hot damn, three for three.

Episode one is entirely based around the story of Say Cheese and Die. We meet the main star Zack Morris (not that one) as Isaiah Howard, a quarterback and your typical jock douchebag. Isaiah finds the spoopy Polaroid camera at a party and takes it home to find that it actually predicts (or causes?) terrible events including Margot (Isa Briones) choking on a candy bar. We know the camera causes the spoops because the vending machine changes her order and she eats nuts without realizing it. If I had a dollar for every time I did that.

Rhinnan Payne plays Allison, the girlfriend of Isaiah who will definitely break up during this season because she’s an asshole and he’s got the hots for his next door neighbor Margot. And who didn’t have a crush on the neighbor growing up? We meet Isabella (Ana Yi Puig) who will come into play later. Isabella is ignored by her classmates and lashes out by trolling them on the internets. It’s a story all 90s kids can relate to.

James (Miles McKenna) is Isaiah’s best friend and is in lesbian with Sam (Aiden Howard), the popular athlete of the town. Oh and Justin Long is here as Nathan Bratt, the new English teacher. Bratt inherits the Biddle house and gets possessed by Harold Biddle’s spoopy ghost form, leading to all sorts of hilarity. Actually his ongoing plot is kinda interesting as you’re never quite sure what he’s after or if it’s the real Harold Biddle toward the start. It could just be a creepy crawly.

After five episodes I think everyone kinda knows where the series is headed. Bratt/Biddle is after a person he constantly refers to as “him” and it’s safe to say that given the terror that the other adults have when referring to “him” that it’s probably not the Him from Powerpuff Girls. It’s very likely Slappy the doll. Maybe it’s the suitcase, the eye, or the fact that Slappy is on the front and center of just about all the advertising around this show that gives it away. Also episode 6 and 9 are Night of the Living Dummy.

Pitching each episode around a story from the books does give the showrunners a lot to work with for a series, but it’s interesting to see how the show tailors them to each character. The camera episode could literally apply universally, but the Haunted Mask was tailored to Isabella being the loner in school. The first four episodes are really intelligently paced as the time repeatedly shifts back to the party at the Biddle house to show us how everyone was affected differently by curses. It’s neat to see the stories interwoven rather than shoving them one after another in a haphazard timeline.

It also plays great with throwing the audience through a loop. They brilliantly played ending episode 2 with James exploding only to immediately explain that backstory with that in episode 3. The smartest choice was airing five episodes at the start because it feels like it’s taken this long to get our establishing pieces in place. Now the audience is hooked. I think it was pretty obvious from the start that the parents killed Biddle, or had a hand in his death. For what it’s worth that plot point is incredibly predictable and stupid.

Outside of the spectacle of the show I guess the two big questions I’m actually interested in are why did the kids kill Biddle and steal Slappy, and what is Slappy up to this time. Good questions to have. The show is a lot better than I expected coming off the trailer with the Travis Scott song.

#6: Night of the Living Dummy Part 1

Night of the Living Dummy is the inevitable conclusion of where the first five episodes left us. Time jumps back yet again, but this time all the way back to the early 1900s where Bratt’s great-grandfather Ephraim (because everyone back then was named Ephraim) discovers Slappy as a failing magician. Turns out most people do meet Slappy at the lowest point in their lives. Like any good domestic abuser, Slappy raises his victims from their lowest points while simultaneously enslaving them to his will. Why? Because he’s evil. Slappy is like a child-friendly version of Michael Myers; evil for the sake of evil.

It’s a strong Slappy episode. Harold Biddle starts a new school having moved into the house his grandpa died in and is afraid of being bullied like he was at the old school. Harold turns on the group, convinced by Slappy that they actually just hate him and don’t understand him, and after discovering that he is a real living entity the group tries to steal him to destroy him, inadvertently killing Harold in the house fire.

So we know why Harold’s spirit is obsessed with Slappy, how the fire happened, and why his demonic spirit is back. It also explains how the various items became cursed, I guess, as they relate to things that Harold was obsessed with at the time. I’m not sure about Goosebumps demonology.

Where do we go from here? Well there’s another Slappy episode, an episode about mud monsters, I’m not sure what “Give Yourself Goosebumps” will be in the context of a show, and the whole season ends on “Welcome To Horrorland,” likely based off One Day At Horrorland that I’m sure will be a big carnival full of spoopies. One Day At Horrorland was a notable book, being adapted into a video games and even getting a two part TV series episode.

#7: Give Yourself Goosebumps

I was curious on where they would go with this plotline and unsurprisingly it has very little to do with the namesake. Also very little goes on. The teens spend the episode trapped in Harold’s doodle book along with the real Mr. Bratt. Nora gets out of the psych ward and grabs Slappy’s parts in order to bring him to a secluded getaway to presumably use him as kindling. Spoiler alert; you can’t burn Slappy.

Honestly this wasn’t a bad story, there’s just not much to say about it. Bratt gets control of his body back but struggles against Biddle, only to throw the book into a puddle. The episode ends with our characters getting pulled through the floor into the abyss of who knows, leading into next week’s episode. Next week’s episode is “You Can’t Scare Me”, whose book is about mud monsters. I’m not sure where the plot could be going that they would incorporate mud monsters, but I’m willing to wait and see.

It was refreshing to see a James clone get blown up without someone mentioning he smells like watermelon Jolly Ranchers. If they don’t explain this by the end of the series I am personally going to put a bomb in the lasagna. If you wanted an episode where Justin Long gets punched several times, this is for you. The James clones really are kinda useless, aren’t they? Outside of the group kidnapping him in their first appearance, they seem to be very easily beaten by everyone who encounters them. Also I knew something was off about Miles McKenna. Dude’s 27.

#8: You Can’t Scare Me

So episode 8 had absolutely nothing to do with the premise of the book. In fact quite the opposite, this is the episode where we go up the mountain and into the snow. Gotta say I’m glad this show keeps surprising me, I did not expect that Harold Biddle’s plot line would come to an end so soon. I kinda expected that he would end this episode by stealing Slappy with episode 9 being a flashback explaining Slappy’s origin, and then episode 10 being the big finale.

I don’t know why they think Slappy is gone just because they threw him off a cliff. Otherwise there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about in this episode. There’s some drama, James makes a DoorDash joke, the kids reconcile with their parents. Everyone realizes that everyone else knows what’s going on so the two sides of the coin can team up to beat Slappy when he inevitably comes back.

Episode 9 will definitely be a flashback episode, I’d be willing to bet a whole quarter on it.

#9: Night of The Living Dummy Part 2

I guess I lost my quarter. Looks like my predictions were half-right, but an episode ahead. I thought last episode would end with Slappy being stolen and put back together and that Biddle would do it, but Bratt did in this episode. Unfortunately I didn’t get my origin episode as I expected, but I did laugh when the lady at the publisher suggested Bratt continue the story with an origin flashback for Slappy. Dumb minds think alike.

It looks like the relationship with Lucas and Margot was over before it began and I feel like we’ll get a Roseanne style ending where Lucas ends up with Isabella and Isaiah decides football isn’t really what he wants out of life, and ends up with Margot in Seattle. And then James ends up taking one of his non-evil clones in the cat suit to pound town and makes a joke about how he’s not evil but he is naughty.

But Slappy finally has a human form again as Chris Greene who has been doing his voice acting for the season. I like Greene’s portrayal of Slappy and seeing him in human form really sets the stage for the last episode. Only one more week!

#10: Welcome to Horrorland

It’s finally over. Man episode 10 was brutal as hell but it finally gave us the Slappy origin story I’ve been expecting for the last two episodes. We learn that Slappy’s real name is Kanduu which is a fake name a soldier took on in 1879 after he discovered an ancient cave full of secret magical spells. The only thing I manage to find in caves is rare forms of pneumonia. This episode was rather shockingly violent.

But of course Kanduu must have some grand plan, and in this case that was to unleash all of the horrors in the book of demons so humanity finally has a common foe to rally against instead of killing each other. Isaiah gets shot and dies, being revived by Margot using the book to revive him. The two set themselves up for a relationship in season 2 while Bratt finds himself once again possessed, this time by Kanduu. Because there’s no way the show is just going to stop using Slappy as a villain. No doubt the whole “using a magic book to revive your dead friend” will be a plot point in season 2 as well.

Overall I’m impressed by the first season of Goosebumps, the show is definitely a lot better than I expected a Disney+ revival to be in 2023.