News

Writers’ Picks: Our Favorite “Goosebumps” Books

Published

7 years ago

July 25, 2017

Image courtesy of the Goosebumps Wikia

Stay Out of the Basement (the second book in the original series) was another one of those stories that was creepy to begin with but when I saw the TV series, it kicked the fear in gear. The story follows a brother and sister who’s dad is a scientist that works in the basement. They start noticing his behavior changing and he gets meaner and more secretive, telling them to never go in his beloved lab. One day they sneak in and find that Dad is working with plants… and quickly turning into one.

The scariest part of this book was the dad. He started nice and became more and more mean. The outbursts and secrecy of his experiment made him a big villain in the story and very intimidating. This was a VHS episode I watched on repeat when I really wanted a scare.

-D.D. Crowley

Image courtesy of MTV

I fist laid eyes on Night of the Living Dummy when I was eight years old. I followed the popular book series in order so this was not my first Goosebumps, but I had no idea the next one in the series was going to be about a doll! This was sadly a time without internet, so the only way you knew about the next book was when you saw it waiting for you on the shelf, or sometimes with a prelude of upcoming book titles in the series.

I watched Child’s Play just three years earlier for the first time, and my fear of dolls was ripe for the picking. Those cold dead eyes in Slappy’s head stared straight into mine. That silent grimace of a mocking laugh in his frozen open mouth mocked me, knowing my fear. He was challenging me to read the horrors that remained unknown inside the pages. The cover alone sent chills through my body.

Like any Goosebumps book I tore through it in days, not able to put it down between elementary school and girl scouts. Any time I had a free minute, I’d pick it up to continue my scary journey down R.L. Stine’s rabbit hole. Usually this free time was before bed, and whether Stine knew this or not this couldn’t have been a more perfect setting for his dark stories to come to life.

The slightly open closet door across from my bed was a dummy peering out from the darkness. The tree branch tapping on my window during the night was a doll rapping his little wooden hand on the glass to terrorize me. Every little noise stood the hair up on the back of my neck and I was sure a ventriloquist dummy was the cause of it. However, I couldn’t put the book down. That was the magic of Stine’s writing. I had to finish the book to make sure the doll was defeated and could never get me. In true Stine fashion this is not how the book ended… not at all.

-Piper Minear

While there are dozens of books to choose from, these are the ones that made our childhood just a bit more spooky. What is your favorite Goosebumps book? Let us know in the comments! Looks like the second Goosebumps movie is headed to Horrorland. You can read about that here.

GIF courtesy of the Complex

(Featured image courtesy of Shane the Gamer)

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

5 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

^{High Desert Hell}

^{The Gemini Project}

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Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

7 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

^{Happy Sad Confused}

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

9 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.