R.L. Stine created the Goosebumps horror book series in the 1990s, which was intended primarily for children aged nine to twelve. These volumes served as a stepping stone into the world of fiction, allowing Stine to establish himself as a favourite among adolescent horror enthusiasts.
Since its initial release, the author has sold over 400 million copies worldwide. Not only has he been compared to Stephen King, but many people consider Stine and J.K. Rowling to be the best children’s fiction writers of all time.
Stine relaunched the novels through numerous spin-offs such as Goosebumps Series 2000, Tales to Give You Goosebumps, and others after publishing sixty-two books between 1992 and 1997.
Not only that, but some of his most well-known stories have also been made into movies and television shows. Given how long this empire has existed, certain species have become more popular than others as a result of their repetition or innate fear aspect.
Today, we remember some of our favourite monsters from the 1995 Canadian-American television series Goosebumps, which was based on R.L. Stine’s stories, and take a journey down memory lane.
Slappy, the Dummy
Slappy the dummy was made out of coffin wood by an ancient sorcerer and comes with the phrases “KarruMarriOdonna Loma MolonuKarrano” etched on him. Slappy comes to life when these words are read aloud, and whoever does so becomes his slave.
He has wavy red hair and sparkling blue eyes, as well as a chip in his lower jaw that allows him to communicate while moving. Slappy has a wicked streak and enjoys torturing his “slaves.” Humans, he believes, are dummies who must all obey him or submit to his abilities.
Episode ten of the first season is titled Night of the Living Dummy and it tells the story of middle child Amy who is ecstatic to get a new dummy as a gift from her father. She wants to practice with it to outshine her siblings on family nights with her performances.
Soon, things start going very wrong and Amy knows exactly who is responsible- her new puppetSlappy! While her family continues to blame her, she tries to convince them that it is all happening because of Slappy.
In the end, the siblings hatch a plan to destroy Slappy, but just when they think they have been successful, they realise whatever was keeping him alive has now taken over an old doll of Amy’s named Dennis.
Slappy appears once again in episode twenty-four and twenty-five of season two, titled Night of the Living Dummy III Part 1 and Part 2. These episodes tell the story of Trina and Dan O’Dell, whose father is obsessed with collecting dummies for his ventriloquist acts.
After reading the magic words Trina finds on one of the dummies, she and her brother start to notice odd changes in the attic where they are all stored. The puppets begin to appear all over the house, with no one remembering taking them out of the attic.
The O’Dells are unable to put Slappy to sleep, but they are able to eliminate him. Trina and Dan give their wicked cousin Zane Slappy as a parting gift when he tells their father about them, and they watch them drive away while Slappy winks at the O’Dell kids.
We find hints of Slappy’s existence in the Goosebumps franchise in a later episode in season three dubbed Bride of the Living Dummy. The episode, however, does not feature him but only a female dummy that is supposed to be Slappy’s love interest.
The Werewolf
The Werewolf of Fever Swamp Part 1 and Part 2 include this monster. Grady and Emily Tucker and their father move to Fever Swamp. Because to the damp weather, spooky old dudes, and a twisted past, the two loathe the place right away. The place gained its name, according to their new acquaintance and local resident Will, after all of the people contracted a severe illness that drove them insane.
Feeling lonely in a new place, Grady adopts a stray dog and names it Wolf due to its ragged appearance. But soon after, dead rabbits start showing up and some of his father’s deer that he was using for his experiments are killed too.
Since everyone believes Wolf to be the culprit, Grady has no choice but to let the dog go. That night, he walks out into the swamp and gets attacked by a werewolf. His dog, Wolf jumps out of nowhere and fights the creature off, saving Grady. Although he loses consciousness, Grady understands during the attack that the werewolf is none other than his new friend Will.
Grady’s father goes to check Will after hearing his son’s claims, but he finds his house empty, and they never hear from him again. Grady is turned into a werewolf as a result of his attack, and the chapter concludes with him and Wolf escaping through Fever Swamp at night.
The werewolf is as tall as any other creature, but his fangs and angry visage give him a far more terrible appearance. Will’s human form is as nice and helpful as the werewolf. As most werewolf tales go, sometimes the person is aware of being a werewolf and sometimes they are not. Which one of that is true in Will’s case is never revealed to us.
The Haunted Mask
Stine has devoted a significant amount of effort to the Haunted Mask, which appears in four of his books as the major enemy. The Haunted Mask is the outcome of a botched experiment carried out by a shopkeeper who despised his own appearance.
He was convinced that if he built a beautiful face out of human flesh that remained permanently attached to the wearer’s original face, he would be able to achieve self-love. But things go wrong, and the mask transforms into a hideous mug, revealing the identity of the shopkeeper on the inside.
After a series of failed tests, he abandoned his endeavour and stored his mask collection in a room that no one could access. The shopkeeper called these masks the Unloved and they sat in the abandoned chamber, waiting to possess another human.
The Haunted Mask Part 1 and Part 2 are the first and second episode of season one. They tell the story of Carly Beth, a young girl tired of being pranked. On Halloween night, she is determined to find the scariest mask possible and use it to frighten all those who humiliated her.
When she goes to buy the mask, the shop owner advises her against it, but she disregards his advice and buys it nonetheless. She discovers, much to her dismay, that the longer she wears the mask, the more it changes her personality. It eventually becomes hard for her to remove it since it has its own malevolent mind.
Carly has no choice but to return to the shopkeeper, who informs her that the only way to remove the mask is to locate a sign of love. Steve, one of the guys who used to prank her, enters at this point, admitting that he only did it because he liked her. Inadvertently, this declaration of love saves Carly from the Haunted Mask.
The Haunted Mask II Part 1 and Part 2 are a continuation of the story, with Steve more in focus this time. The story stretches over episode eleven and twelve of season two. Unknown to the dangers of Carly’s mask from previous Halloween, Steve wishes to own one that looks just as scary.
Despite Carly refusing to tell him where she got the item from, Steve is able to find a creepy stranger who leads him to the mask in an abandoned basement. While all this goes down, he remains unaware that the mask had been pursuing Steve all along for the same evil intentions it had with Carly.
In the end Carly and Steve join hands with their friends Sabrina and Chuck and together they are able to fight against its evil and burn all the Unloved.
The Lawn Gnomes
The protagonist Joe Burton lives with his sister Mindy and their parents in episode eight of season two, Revenge of the Law Their next-door neighbour, retired army major Mr McCall, is frequently at conflict with them. The Major is obsessed with his garden and is determined to win the Annual Garden Show against the Burtons.
Joe’s father sends home ornamental Lawn Gnomes for their backyard in the hopes of giving it a new look for the winter, but Joe notices right away that something about these unusually enormous gnomes bothers him. Mr McCall comes over to the Burton residence the morning after the gnomes are purchased to protest about his garden being trespassed into and ruined.
He claims to know it was Joe’s doing, as Joe has always desired to destroy his botanical garden, but Joe denies all accusations. It does not take Joe long to figure out that it is the work of the garden gnomes that come to life every night and wander into McCall’s garden to destroy it.
Joe and Mindy follow the gnomes at night, only to realize that they are outnumbered. They are only able to escape when the Major turns on his garden lights which inadvertently freezes the gnomes in place.
McCall carries the terracotta figures through the dark passage between his house and his neighbours’ to put it back in place and it is in this darkness that the gnome comes back to life and attacks him.
The next morning judges for the Garden Show arrive and claim that they cannot give the Burton’s the award due to the presence of a “hideous lawn ornament”. When the family walks over to see what they are talking about, they are horrified to find a gnome that looks exactly like Major McCall.
The gnomes are about 3ft tall and have grumpy expressions on their faces. When they come to life, these expressions remain intact and act in accordance with their violent nature. While one of them is dressed in a red pointy hat, yellow full-sleeved t-shirt and sky-blue pants, the other wears a blue hat, red t-shirt and navy blue pants.
As usual, certain creative liberties led to the television adaptation being a little different from the book. In the episode, the kids aresignificantly more invested in their father’s efforts to win the Garden Show, unlike the book where they are embarrassed of his obsession with something so trivial.
Not only this, but the introduction of the additional lawn gnomes came out of nowhere in the episode whereas the readers got a back story about them in the book. Most notably, light freezes the gnomes in the episode as opposed to a dog whistle doing the job in the book.
The Scarecrows
Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, the fourteenth episode of season two, is a classic rural horror with a monster we’ve come to love and admire. Jodie and her brother Mark arrive at a farm to spend the summer with their grandparents. For the most part, they’re joined by farmhand Stanley and his kid Sticks, but something about them bothers Jodie right away.
In one of the earlier scenes, we see a scarecrow knocking on the windows at night and Stanley warns the kids the next morning about them coming to life every evening. Soon, all this talk about the creepy scarecrows starts to get under Jodie and Mark’s skins, making them paranoid.
One night Jodie and Mark hatch a plan to scare Sticks as a prank, but things soon go sideways when they encounter a real scarecrow that has come to life. Jodie presses Sticks for the truth, and he tells her about his father discovering a book of spells, which he used to resurrect the effigies.
The scarecrows attack Jodie, Mark, Sticks, and Stanley, trapping them in the barn, where they attempt to fend them off. Finally, Mark saves them by driving his lawn mower truck over the scarecrows.
When things are back to normal the next morning at breakfast, Stanley sits in a corner reading from his book. Jodie looks curiously at Stanley and inquires what he is reading after hearing the lawn mower start up on its own in the barn. The episode ends on a cliffhanger headed in an obvious direction.
Staying very true to the art on the book cover, the scarecrows in the episode are seen wearing ragged farmer clothes and hats, and stand tall above the regular-sized humans. They have wooden stick frame and are primarily made up of straws like most scarecrows are.
There are two major changes in the episode from the book- one being the scarecrows are crushed under the lawn mower as opposed to being set on fire and the other being Stanley accidentally bringing the lawn mower to life in the end as opposed to a teddy bear.
Mr Mortman
The Girl Who Cried Monster, the fourth episode, features twelve-year-old Lucy Dark, who enjoys scaring her younger brother Randy by telling him terrifying stories. She enjoys all things supernatural and occasionally visits her local library to check out ghost literature.
She finds she has forgotten her roller blades as she leaves the library after borrowing a Frankenstein book. When she returns to collect them, she notices something strange: Mr Mortman, the librarian, is consuming bugs and spiders in a disgusting manner.
When Lucy believes she’s seen enough, she discovers Mr Mortman morphing into a bizarre monster with eyes projecting from its head, slimy green skin, and fangs where his teeth used to be.
Lucy returns home to tell her parents about what she saw, but no one believes her because they all know she fabricates paranormal stories to terrify people. Even her buddy Aaron Messer refuses to believe her, so she returns to the library for further proof.
While clicking photos, Lucy gets spotted by Mr Mortman, but after some struggling manages to escape. Out of politeness, Lucy’s parents invite the librarian for dinner and ask her to stop saying all the outrageous things she has been about him.
That evening Mr Mortman asks what is for dinner and in a classic R.L. Stine-style twist, Lucy’s parents say “you”, right before they grow serpent-like fangs and devour him. They tell Lucy and Randy afterwards that this is the first time in twenty years there has been a monster in town apart from them and that when it is time for the children to transform, they must also ensure that no other monster settles in their vicinity.
As many of you must have guessed, the title of this episode is a modern horror twist on the famous tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Both Lucy and the boy from those tales are not believed when they claim they have seen actual danger because of all the previous times they lied about it just for their own sadistic pleasure of freaking people out.
The television episode ended up making a few small changes such as showing Mortman feasting on spiders, unlike his book version that feasted on his pet turtles. Another major change was Lucy’s parents inviting Mortman to dinner, whereas in the book, it was Lucy’s friend Aaron who tells the parents about Mortman being a monster as he had seen it himself. This convinced them that their daughter was telling the truth after all.
The Evil Camera
This “monster” first appears in the fifteenth episode of the first season, Say Cheese and Die, and then again in the eighteenth episode of season three, Say Cheese and Die… Again! The sequel was written by Stine after the first one had been published. Greg and his pals come upon an ancient camera while visiting a frightening mansion owned by a man named Spidey.
Greg is convinced that the camera is to blame after a sequence of occurrences linking it to accidents. No photo clicked on that camera comes out as it was clicked, rather the person in the photos suffers the same fate that is depicted in them. Having had enough of the devices “powers” Greg and his friend Shari go back to put it where they got it from and run into Spidey. He reveals to them that his real name is Dr. Fritz Fredericks and that he is a deranged scientist.
Back when the camera was created by Fritz’ partner, his greed led him to steal it, but he realized all too late that his partner had put a dark spell on the shutter which is why only bad fate lies for those whose photos are clicked with it.
Greg and Shari click Spidey’s photo in an attempt to escape him as he tries to make them his prisoners for finding out the truth. This causes Spidey to die from the fear of something bad happening to him.
Although Greg leaves the camera where he first found it and reports Spidey’s corpse to the police, two local bullies who had followed them there retrieve the camera for themselves. The story ends with them waiting for their photo to develop after they use the camera on themselves.
Greg returns to the house for the camera in the sequel because he wrote an essay about it for his summer project. The teacher refused to give him a passing grade because his account was too improbable, prompting him to seek proof. Things take a turn for the worse once more, but Greg is adamant about getting his grade.
Throughout the novel, many people are injured as a result of the evil camera, and the story concludes with Greg agreeing to allow the teacher take his picture in order to prove that his project is worth the passing grade.
Rip the Cat
The demonic cat Rip is featured in the fifth and sixth episodes of season four, titled Cry of the Cat Part 1 and Part 2. The story starts with a strange interaction between Rip and little Allison Moore. When she runs him over by accident, she drags his body to the owner’s house, only to learn from another young girl named Crystal that her mother will be furious.
Rip resurrects and vanishes into the woods before anything else happens. Rip returns to school the next day in search of Allison and is involved in yet another accident, dying and resurrecting. Allison begins to notice cat hair in unexpected places. And when she wakes up in the middle of the night to find Rip trying to choke her, she tosses him out of the window, killing him a third time.
This is when she starts exhibiting cat-like behaviour herself. Soon, Allison visits Crystal to demand some answers where she finds out that Rip has actually been dead for years and has used up eight of his nine lives.
Crystal introduces Allison to her mother, who is half human and half cat. The mother tells Allison that all this is the result of a series of failed experiments where many cats ended up dying, but Rip was too evil and just kept coming back to life.
She also reveals to her that anyone Rip scratches turns into a cat-like creature, which explains Allison’s present condition. Amidst all this chaos Rip and the other undead cats arrive, demanding a sacrifice and Crystal’s mother offers Allison in place of Crystal.
Allison successfully distracts the cats, resulting in a struggle in which Rip is killed for the final time. Despite the fact that Crystal and her mother have been freed from the curse, Allison continues to show signs of change towards the end of the novel.
Rip has dark grey fur and yellow eyes that glow in the dark. Its sharp teeth and bloodlust give it a particularly terrifying appearance. Despite the fact that the book defines Rip as being the size of a typical cat, the episode gives him a wing-like structure on his back, making him even more unsettling.
Creeps
The dynamics of middle school bullies are explored in the nineteenth episode of season two, titled Calling All Creeps. Ricky Beamer, a sixth-grader who is tired of being picked on by his seniors, decides to take matters into his own hands. He tries to give out his bully’s phone number, Tasha McClain, with a note urging all “creeps” to call her after midnight.
This scheme, however, backfires when Tasha finds out and gives out his number instead, resulting in Ricky receiving strange phone calls late at night. Ricky is confronted by his three bullies on his way to school, who morph into the creeps who had been calling him.
They have human bodies with slimy amphibian heads and frog-like tongues who are now referring to Ricky as their master. They force him to put in a bunch of black coloured seeds into the school lunch so as to transform all the other kids into creeps as well.
After the plan fails, they almost turn on Ricky, but his friend Iris jumps in claiming she has a new plan that will save him. They decide to put the identity seeds into the cookies Ricky and Iris sell at their Bake Sale stall.
At first, he thinks of stopping the kids from eating the cookies but thinking back on all their bullying decides to let them eat it and turn into his followers after all. The episode ends with Ricky consuming a cookie and turning into a creep himself. In a metaphoric way, he is finally able to be one amongst the many and no more an outcast, but the price he pays is quite hefty.
The Creeps in the novel resemble those in the television adaptation, with the exception that their heads are purple rather than the yellow ones seen in the episode. Despite the fact that Iris tries to stop Ricky from eating the cookies in the episode, she does nothing in the book.
Ricky’s mother and the school principal were both absent from the episode, but in the grand scheme of things, they didn’t have much of an impact on the conclusion.
The Horrors
The Horrors are monsters who were formed out of a slime pool cursed by a witch and appear in the eighth and ninth episodes of season three, titled One Day at Horrorland Part 1 and Part 2.
The monsters appear warped and frightening because the slime pool was radioactive in nature, and each of them has their own distinct description. They all have one thing in common: they materialise when visitors ride through Horrorland and whisper terrifying things into their ears.
When Luke and Lizzy Morris take a roadtrip with their parents to visit the Zoo Gardens theme park, they get lost. In a detour, that seems intentional in the greater scheme of things, they end up at another theme park called Horrorland.
This place has workers in monster “costumes” and no working phones for them to call a ride, as their car breaks down. Soon, the family realizes that the monsters, known as the Horrors, are very real and they must find a way to escape them.
Luke and Lizzy are able to outsmart the Horrors for a brief moment that the family uses to get out of Horrorland and steal a bus to go home. Little do they know, one of the Horrors has followed them into the city and is now offering them a ticket to the theme park next year.
The Horrors have green scaly bodies and faces with black coloured horns. Although the television adaptation makes most of them look similar, the book has described them to have different personalities, with a couple of them even being helpful.
Swamp Monster
The Swamp Monster first appears in season two’s How to Kill a Monster, in episode eighteen. Gretchen and her stepbrother Clark arrive at her grandparents’ property in the middle of a swamp to begin the story.
The house is old and has the appearance of an abandoned mansion, except for the grandfather’s hunting mementos. It’s evident from the start that something isn’t quite right, and the grandparents are complicit in it. Gretchen and Clark come across a room that is off-limits one day while playing hide and seek.
On entering they see a gigantic creature that looks like a cross-breed between an alligator and a giant turtle. The kids name it the Swamp Monster because of its slimy orange outer skin with scales on it.
While trying to outrun the monster, they lead it off an edge where it seemingly falls to its death. But the beast returns and Gretchen quickly thinks of a solution to distract it for some time. Assuming that it would be willing to eat anything, the kids prepare a gravy using every edible item available to them and feed it to the monster after which it passes out.
When it wakes up again, it attempts to eat Clark’s arm but ends up vomiting all over the place as it is allergic to him. The episode has a sort of abrupt ending as we see the kids running out into the swamp and then realising there are more monsters out there that come out after dark.
Why the monster passes out after eating the food Gretchen and Clark make for it, or why it is allergic to Clark, is unknown. The book doesn’t answer any of these questions, although the Swamp Monster in this version looks nothing like the one in the television adaptation.
The creature in the book has a green body with an alligator head and an alligator head. Another significant difference is that the monster is brought home by the grandfather after being shot, rather than the monster breaking and entering like in the book.
The Blob
The Blob is a slimy pink creature with a big tongue that swallows anything (or everyone!) in its path. It first appears in season two’s episode The Blob That Ate Everyone, which is titled The Blob That Ate Everyone. Zackie Beauchamp Beauchamp Beauchamp. He’d been writing about the Blob monster’s exploits for a time when he came across a typewriter that piqued his interest.
Each phrase seems to come true as soon as he starts typing a story on the typewriter, which frightens Zackie’s pal Alex. Zackie continues to write his story about the Blob despite her warnings that something is amiss with the typewriter. The next day, in an unusual change of events, the entire town is terrified, with several people claiming to have seen a monster.
When Zackie notices the Blob terrorising the village, he attempts to make atonement by finishing his novel, but his keys become stuck just as the Blob enters his room. Zackie believes that the outcome of the story is in his hands, not the typewriter’s, and goes on to wish for the Blob’s disappearance and the return of all the townfolk.
The story ends with us finding out that the whole thing was actually something the Blob was narrating to his own monster friends. When they express their disapproval of the sad ending and demand that the Blob eat everyone in the end, he takes it into consideration and rewrites the ending himself.