The Goosebumps franchise didn’t make its big screen debut until 2015. Hollywood has been attempting to find out how to bring R.L. Stine’s legendary characters and stories to life for quite some time before then. At one point, Tim Burton was attached to direct an adaptation, and George A. Romero even tried his hand at writing a story.
The Horror Studies section of the University of Pittsburgh Library System found that script from the George Romero Archive this week, and they’ve provided facts on their website.
According to the crew, Romero’s approach to Goosebumps was to adapt the first book in Stine’s series, Welcome to Dead House.
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The novel by R.L. Stine is set in the town of Dark Falls, where the residents are secretly the living dead. When the Benson family comes in, Josh and Amanda learn that a flashlight beam is enough to turn the entire village into dust. To maintain its zombie existence, the community must feed on the blood of a new family every year.
Romero keeps the fundamental plot and all of the main characters’ names, but changes the story in unexpected ways. In the Stine novel, zombification occurs as a result of a mystery chemical escaping from a nearby factory. Romero however, emphasises the capitalistic foundations and writes that the people’ state of living death was caused by a supernatural force that Devries has now shared with/imposed on the community.
In Romero’s storey, the home is “undead,” as it is possessed by Devries’ ghost. Devries / the home feeds on its residents, draining their energy till they pass away and come back as the undead. Romero’s nightmare scenario involves not being slaughtered and eaten, but rather having an abysmal, soul-sucking work.
Visit the Horror Studies webpage of the University of Pittsburgh Library System to learn a lot more about Romero’s socially conscious film Goosebumps. The University of Pittsburgh acquired the George A. Romero Archival Collection in 2019, and the team has been hard at work conserving lost gems from Romero’s career.
