{"id":3558,"date":"2016-05-15T08:12:57","date_gmt":"2016-05-15T02:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=3558"},"modified":"2016-05-15T08:12:57","modified_gmt":"2016-05-15T02:42:57","slug":"goosebumps-2-rl-stine-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=3558","title":{"rendered":"Why I Won\u2019t Be Watching Goosebumps 2 in Theatres"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u2019T<\/span><\/p><\/div>

is the season to be scared! In the run-up to <\/span>Halloween<\/span><\/a>, moviemakers and streaming services are taking it upon themselves to frighten audiences with horror-themed content. The brave of heart have already started to watch <\/span>Haunting on Hill House <\/span><\/i>on Netflix, and audiences in theatres have a chance to revisit the stabbing antics of Michael Myers in the <\/span>Halloween <\/span><\/i>reboot. The mid-schoolers, meanwhile, will be in the next auditorium watching <\/span>Goosebumps<\/span><\/i>, which is like horror, but with training wheels still attached.<\/span>\n\nToday\u2019s <\/span>twenty-somethings<\/span><\/a> will likely remember the <\/span>Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>novels. They were as widespread in libraries and on bookshelves in the \u201990s and early-\u201900s as DJ Aqeel videos on Channel V. Paperbacks, often dozens of volumes, stacked in rows, with covers that usually featured a monstrous antagonist and that signature, textured title font that mimicked the feel of the goosebumps the series\u2019 title boasted of causing. Written by RL Stine, the <\/span>Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>books were the perfect baby pool to splash around in before wading off into the lake of horror. I wouldn\u2019t have been able to read classic spine-chillers by HP Lovecraft or contemporary fright-fests by Stephen King if I hadn\u2019t learned to steel my nerves by reading Stine.<\/span>\n\nAlong with <\/span>Fear Street<\/span><\/i>, Stine\u2019s other popular horror series meant for teens and young adults, <\/span>Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>was where younger readers were introduced to the tropes of horror, but not scared senseless by them. There\u2019s a lite-version of most iconic horror stories to be found somewhere in the anthology of <\/span>Goosebumps<\/span><\/i> tales. <\/span>The Shining<\/span><\/i> is my favourite horror novel, and when I <\/span>first completed it<\/span><\/a>, it scared me off reading anything at all for two whole weeks. But then I remembered that the Overlook Hotel was a lot like the spooky mansion in the <\/span>Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>classic<\/span> Welcome to Dead House<\/span><\/i>, and managed to cure my jitters. The evil Chucky doll from <\/span>Child\u2019s Play <\/span><\/i>was (and is) pure nightmare fuel, but pretending he was Slappy from <\/span>Night of the Living Dummy <\/span><\/i>stopped me from losing too much sleep. Zombies, werewolves, vampires, mummies \u2013 all the horror staples that would populate the more mature books, films, and shows I\u2019d come across as I grew older, I first encountered in the pages of Stine\u2019s books.<\/span>\n\n

\u201cReal horror is a culture where kids, especially boys, don’t read \u2013 and Stine has done his best to stop that turn of the screw from happening in his lifetime,\u201d says writer Patrick Jones<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nMost of the <\/span>Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>novels have a happy ending, with the kid protagonists returning to safety at the end of the action. Most, but not all. <\/span>Give Yourself Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>was the spin-off series, roleplaying game books that allowed you to choose your own adventure, and if you made the wrong choices, they did not end well. For a ten-year-old grounded from using the <\/span>PlayStation<\/span><\/a>, these game books were just as thrilling, along with scoring you brownie points from elders for being the kid who reads, which simply added to their appeal.<\/span>\n\nBeing picked up and read is the highest form of praise a book can receive, and Stine\u2019s series helped me learn to appreciate the written word at an age when Cartoon Network and video-games were tempting alternatives. The books were never meant to be taken seriously, and there is precious little literary value to them when I thumb through an old, dog-eared copy today. But they did foster the habit of reading, and that gives them merit. Stine\u2019s books have always elicited polarised opinions, with conservative groups in USA during the \u201990s petitioning to ban the <\/span>Goosebumps <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Fear Streets <\/span><\/i>books for \u201cSatanic and occult themes\u201d at the height of their popularity. Others dismissed them as fluff, but as Patrick Jones mentions in his book <\/span>What\u2019s So Scary About R.L. Stine<\/span><\/i>, \u201creal horror is a culture where kids, especially boys, don’t read \u2013 and Stine has done his best to stop that turn of the screw from happening in his lifetime.\u201d<\/span>\n\nI probably will not be going to see the new <\/span>Goosebumps<\/span><\/i> movie in theatres on <\/span>Halloween weekend<\/span><\/a>. I learned the lesson that it\u2019s better not to tarnish the memories of the books I would read by torchlight after bedtime with a movie more goofy and ghastly from the first film. But when I\u2019m picking up popcorn during the interval of <\/span>Halloween<\/span><\/i>, I hope to see kids queueing up for <\/span>Goosebumps<\/span><\/i>, and then I\u2019ll know I left the old paperbacks in my school library in good hands.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I learned the lesson that it\u2019s better not to tarnish the memories of the books I would read by torchlight after bedtime with a movie more goofy and ghastly. Written by RL Stine, the Goosebumps books were where younger readers were introduced to all of horror\u2019s tropes as a genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":3559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[6733,6734,6735,919,1745,4452,6736,6737,6738,6739,6740],"class_list":["post-3558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-fear-street","tag-goosebumps","tag-goosebumps-2","tag-halloween","tag-hollywood","tag-horror","tag-hp-lovecraft","tag-r-l-stine","tag-rl-stine","tag-scary-movies","tag-stephen-king"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy I Won\u2019t Be Watching Goosebumps 2 in Theatres<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I learned the lesson that it\u2019s better not to tarnish the memories of the books I would read by torchlight after bedtime with a movie more goofy and ghastly. 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