Goosebumps: The Vanishing Premiere Recap: A Family’s Horrific Past Unleashes New Hell — Grade It!
R.L. Stine wants to invade your nightmares…. again. Or at least the nightmares of your kids.
In the Season 2 premiere of Goosebumps: The Vanishing, a tragedy 30 years prior comes back to haunt the Brewer family, as an ancient evil — and some very strange plants? — is unleashed and wreaks havoc on their Brooklyn community.
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We start in the New York City borough in 1994, where a group of kids accept a dare to spend the night in a spooky tunnel, an area where some fatal medical experiments were held in the past. The area’s been haunted ever since, or so says the legend. As they schlep further inside the windy concrete walls, they find some leftover medical equipment that’s still jacked up with power. Everything seems to come alive at once, opening a hole in the floor that emits a weird, gaseous black… something. And it’s right then when a boy named Matty’s face appears to melt away (vanish?) all the way down to the bone.
We jump to 2024, where Devin and Cece are getting off the subway in Brooklyn to visit their dad (Anthony, played by David Schwimmer) for the summer. He only has one rule (well, in addition to the informational packets he prepared for them): Stay out of the basement. He brings them downstairs to his botany lab, where he’s working on all sorts of strange experiments. Devin touches one of the glass cases, causing Anthony to freak. He tries to play it off as a light joke, but something sinister seems to be going on down there…
When the family gets back from dinner, police officer Jen Morales is waiting for Anthony. She brings him a baggie full of his brother’s things from the night that he died. Anthony and Jen were two of the kids in the opening scene. Anthony was the one they called “Stink.” Matty was his brother.
Later, the siblings (who are twins!) meet up with a new friend CJ and a girl named Frankie at the park. CJ tells a larger group of kids about Devin and Cece’s family history and their uncle’s death. CJ says the kids in 1994 were “killed by ghosts,” which the siblings try to refute. Resident d-bag Trey (who happens to be their neighbor for the summer) dares Devin to go to the scene of his uncle’s disappearance, and like the dumb teens they are, they all head to the tunnels together. At night. With bolt cutters. Against Cece’s wishes, Devin goes in, flashlight in hand, to take a few pics and (of course) impress his crush, Frankie.
Neighbor-bully-jerkface Trey takes the bolt cutters to the tunnel’s electrical whatchamacallits, which causes a minor explosion and opens up that wicked grate that got Matty in ’94. When Devin looks down, he sees Matty, black blood streaking down his face. The same streaks now appear on Devin’s, but he makes it out of there alive. He doesn’t remember anything about the tunnel though. But did they just unleash some sort of evil upon the city?
After an unsettling visit to his dementia-stricken mother, Anthony goes down into his basement and opens the bag filled with his brother’s clothes. He pulls out the Beastie Boys hoodie we’ve seen a few times by now. But when he does, he finds a mysterious powder staining the shoulder. He puts the substance under his microscope and it appears to be moving. Then, some of Anthony’s plants start to move until the vines eventually grow so much that they viciously attack him.
As that’s happening, a loud humming sound invades Devin’s head and he goes outside to escape it. As he walks into the street, we see the vines escape through a basement grate. They catch up with Devin and pull him down into the sewers below. His body hits the concrete with a heavy thwack! Then, the plant emits some sort of gas right into Devin’s face, and his mug once again becomes streaked in black. He’s able to make it back up to ground level, but he can’t remember how he got there. As for Anthony, he’s got strange looking lacerations all over his arm, to which he says, “Well, that’s not good.”
What did you think of The Vanishing’s first episode? Grade it below, then hit the comments section.
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