‘Goosebumps’ Is Back on TV. Here’s What to Know

“Say cheese!” a boy shouts in the first episode of “Goosebumps,” a new series on Disney+ and Hulu, jumping out of a closet as he snaps a Polaroid photo of his friend’s startled face.

The image is familiar to anyone who has read — or just seen the cover — of “Say Cheese and Die!,” one of the most beloved of R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” books. The best-selling children’s horror book series, first published in 1992 and still regularly rolling out, follows the adventures of tweens and teens who find themselves in supernatural circumstances.

But now there are a few differences: Unlike in the novels, in which almost every single essential character is white, the boy is Black. The characters are in high school, not middle school. The series is set in the present, not the 1990s. (There’s a “Hamilton” reference in the pilot.)

“We want to make sure the show appeals to the widest audience possible,” said Rob Letterman, who directed the 2015 “Goosebumps” film and created the new show with Nicholas Stoller. (They previously collaborated on the film adaptation of “Captain Underpants.”) The first half of the new 10-episode series premieres, appropriately, on Friday the 13th. (New episodes will arrive every Friday through Nov. 17.)

Stine’s horror franchise now comprises more than 200 books and counting, a four-season 1990s television series, two films starring Jack Black as Stine, several comic book adaptations and a video game series. The new show, which unlike the books and the ’90s anthology TV series follows the same characters across multiple episodes, draws from five of the most popular “Goosebumps” books, including “The Haunted Mask” and “Night of the Living Dummy.”

“We couldn’t have turned the book series directly into a TV show; it was too spare,” said Stoller, who wrote the first and last episodes of the first season. “You don’t know much about the characters.”

In a video call last week from their homes in Los Angeles, Stoller and Letterman, whose teenage children grew up reading the books, shared what they updated for the new “Goosebumps” series and why. Here’s what to know.

The shows mirrors the horror-comedy blend of the books.

“We didn’t really have to explain it to Disney,” Stoller said. “As soon as we were like, ‘We want it to be funny, but it’s also scary, but it’s also dramatic and it’s kids and it’s adults,’ they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we got it.’”

Letterman said he and Stoller had fun playing with different subgenres of horror. “Each episode, by design, has a different genre vibe,” he said. They are unified by a production aesthetic “that’s very cinematic, grounded, gritty, real,” he said.

“We wanted that texture of reality so that when we couched all this supernatural stuff in it, it elevated,” Letterman said.

It follows the same characters throughout.

“Making it serialized — that was where the invention happens, where Rob and I kind of add our own stuff,” Stoller said.

The first five episodes present origin stories for the five main characters, which then intertwine at the end of Episode 5. “The back five episodes are then uncovering what’s behind everything that’s happened to them,” Letterman said.

But you won’t recognize any of the names. Stoller and Letterman wrote a pilot script, then created new characters to better reflect the actors they cast. ”Because we aged them up, it just didn’t make sense to use the same characters from the books,” Letterman said.

They made the characters older primarily because they want the show to appeal to three different groups: Adult fans of the original “Goosebumps” books, young teens who are reading the series now and people who aren’t familiar with the franchise at all.

“You can get a bigger audience when you age it up,” Stoller said. “I think if the show was about 13-year-olds, my 16-year-old might be a little less interested.”

High school characters were also ideal thematically. “We wanted the stakes to be higher and to elevate the horror,” Letterman said. “What tends to be scarier than demonic possession is just being a teenager in high school right now.”

The creators combed through the first 60 books in the original series, and then chose five that worked the best as the basis for the origin story episodes: “Say Cheese and Die!,” “The Haunted Mask,” “The Cuckoo Clock of Doom,” “Go Eat Worms!” and “Night of the Living Dummy.”

While much has been updated, the series will also include one of the franchise’s signature villains: Slappy the Dummy. Would it even be “Goosebumps” without him?

“Slappy was meant to be sort of an Easter egg reveal, but then he made it on the cover of the billboard,” Letterman said.

The series is now set in the present.

The events of the new series were kick-started in 1993, and there is a flashback that will scratch a nostalgic itch for fans of the original book series.

But for the most part, the story stays in the present. Cellphones exist. A character makes a “Hamilton” reference. The Travis Scott song “Goosebumps,” released in 2016, makes an appearance.

The update was less complicated than one might think because the books were never particularly topical, Stoller noted.

“There’s not a lot of Bill Clinton references that we had to scrub,” he said. “The pilot is all built around this Polaroid camera, but that’s even a thing kids know from Urban Outfitters now.”

While there are Easter eggs as well as fashion and musical allusions to the 1990s, the creators were wary of treating the decade and its hallmarks as a running joke.

“Referencing the ’90s, or making fun of the ’90s, is something ‘Stranger Things’ has really done well with the ’80s,” Stoller explained. “But we wanted to tell an earnest, contemporary high school story. We didn’t want to get into something that was bordering on parody.”

R.L. Stine has signed off.

Stine was closely involved. Letterman directed the author in the first “Goosebumps” movie — Stine has made cameos in both of the films based on his books — and Letterman said he was “incredibly supportive” of the new series. (Stine was not available for comment because he is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, whose members are still on strike.)

“We did it with his blessing,” Letterman said. “We talked to him early on, then showed him the episodes and got some very nice notes from him.”

“It’s really nice to make something based on someone else’s original work that that original creator is proud of,” he added, noting that he and Stoller hope to make many more seasons.