R.L. Stine Says Three New ‘Fear Street’ Films Are in the Works, Reacts to How ‘Goosebumps: The Vanishing’ Elevates the Horror
More murder and mayhem is coming to Shadyside with three more Fear Street films in development.
That’s according to the master of middle-grade horror, R.L. Stine, who reveals just how many more adaptations of his popular young adult horror novel series are currently in the works while speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Disney+’s Goosebumps: The Vanishing premiere, coming Jan. 10.
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“The writers are working,” Stine shares. “So I’ve got my fingers crossed.”
The three films will follow Netflix’s successful 2021, Leigh Janiak-directed trilogy, as well as the upcoming fourth film, The Prom Queen, which has finished filming and is slated for sometime in 2025. (The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Netflix for more details.)
The original YA horror series, which had sold over 80 million copies by 2010, was first released in 1989 with debut title The New Girl, and features 51 books total. That’s alongside more than 100 spinoff entries, which Stine began releasing in 2014.
A mix of the slasher and supernatural genres, the Fear Street franchise centers on a group of young teens living in the fictional town of Shadyside who encounter malignant and murderous entities and adversaries. Its older characters and deadly encounters have historically distinguished it from Goosebumps, Stine’s widely popular, best-selling preadolescence and tween series — an audience the author remains excited to write for.
“That’s the best audience in the world, the 7 to 11 [age],” Stine tells THR. “I get them the last time in their lives they’ll ever be enthusiastic. At 7 to 11, they want to read you, they want to buy things. They want to know you. They want to write to you. They want to meet you. They’re incredible. Then they turn 12, they discover sex, they have to be cool and they’re gone.”
The success of the Fear Street movie trilogy, and now Sony Pictures Television and Disney+’s series anthology approach to Goosebumps, however, is proving Stine might not be losing his audience to hormones as quickly as once believed. Hollywood’s first go at aging up the Goosebumps narrative, the Disney+ series’ first season, which was released in 2023 in time for Halloween, broke into Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming ratings in just its second week. Also available on Hulu, it marked a rare appearance by a Disney+ series on the list that wasn’t a Marvel or Star Wars property.
While Stine had only seen two episodes of the new second season, The Vanishing, prior to speaking to THR, the author shares what he most appreciates so far about how the streamer’s aged-up approach to his popular middle-grade series were staying true to his books.
“It’s the surprises, for one thing — the shocks,” he explains. “When I write a Goosebumps book, that’s my most important thing, the twists and the shocks. Someone wrote a line that I wish I had written for the Goosebumps movie, where Jack Black played me, and at the very end, Jack is teaching a class, and he says, ‘Every story has a beginning, a middle and a twist,’ which perfectly describes [Goosebumps]. It perfectly describes it and it describes the TV show as well. I think they’re not predictable. So much of children’s literature is so linear, and so many horror movies, you know what’s coming. But I always try to have something that turns it all around that no one’s expecting.”
When it comes to the anthology series, Stine notes that what the second season starring David Scwhimmer has gotten right is his appreciation for fumbling adults, too. “Another thing I like, and this is true to the books, [is that] the parent is always useless,” he says. “In Goosebumps, either they don’t believe the kid or they’re not around and they don’t help.”
It surprised him overall how the series uses that aged-up cast to elevate the horrors of his tween series.
“I was kind of shocked at first to see all these teenagers walking around. But what they’ve done, they’ve made it older — high school kids — and they’ve hyped up the scares as well. It’s scarier. I just watched the first two episodes of the new season, and man, it’s very different, and it’s terrifying,” he says.
“The thing about Goosebumps is that no one ever dies. That’s the difference between Goosebumps and Fear Street [where] we kill off teenagers, right and left. We kill them all. Everyone loves it when you kill teenagers,” the author tells THR. “There was a death in these first two episodes of the new [Goosebumps] season, but they have it happening 30 years ago. That’s a big difference. So it’s still Goosebumps. It’s just been elevated.”
Ahead of the first season’s release, president of Disney Branded Television Ayo Davis told THR that Goosebumps was an opportunity for the streamer to more fully enter its co-viewing era, following a long history of playing “in the sandbox with preschoolers” and “with those kids [aged] 6 to 11.”
“We’ve had a focus on kids and families, mostly through the Disney Channel and Disney Jr. But a few years back as we expanded, we took on creating content for Disney+ as well and that’s what really fits into that family and co-viewing space,” Davis said at the time. “But to really lean into that co-viewing experience is a newer area for us, so we thought Goosebumps was a perfect opportunity to broaden with the audience for that title.”
The first 10-episode season, which starred Justin Long, was based on more popular entries in Stine’s long-running series and followed five teens from the Pacific Northwest who, after hosting a house party where a young boy died decades earlier, enter the basement and all leave with different haunted artifacts that begin to wreak havoc on their lives and reveal a horrifying secret kept by their parents.
For season two, executive producers and showrunners Hilary Winston and Rob Letterman revealed during the series’ New York Comic Con panel that The Vanishing would adapt Stay Out of the Basement, The Haunted Car, Monster Blood, The Girl Who Cried Monster, The Ghost Next Door and Welcome to Camp Nightmare. During the series New York Comic Con panel last October, the duo also revealed the season will feature a found footage episode, directed by Blair Witch helmer Eduardo Sánchez.
Goosebumps: The Vanishing also stars Ana Ortiz, Jayden Bartels, Sam McCarthy, Elijah M. Cooper, Galilea La Salvia, Francesca Noel and Stony Blyden. The season premieres on Disney+ and Hulu Jan. 10, dropping all eight episodes at once.
Beyond The Vanishing and upcoming The Prom Queen, when asked which of his books Stine would most like to see adapted next, the author shares it’s a “Goosebumps book that nobody likes and no one’s ever interested in”: Brain Juice.
“It’s about kids who drink this purple liquid and get smarter and smarter. They get too smart for everything. They get thrown out of school, they lose all their friends, and then they’re kidnapped by aliens, and on the way to the other planet, they get stupider and stupider,” Stine tells THR. “It’s my favorite Goosebumps book, but nobody knows it and it’ll never be adapted.”
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