As a young girl, I devoured the bags of Goosebumps stories my mother brought home from the used bookstore as one would devour bags of buttered popcorn at the movies. To my young mind, R. L. Stine’s books were genuinely horrifying, captivating my imagination in a way that many contemporary writers don’t seem to have the ability to do anymore. Stine takes scares seriously, so he takes young adults seriously. Unfortunately, the new Goosebumps film, out in theaters now, does not.
In his essay, On Fairy Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien identified a crisis in children’s stories fifty years in the making:
It is true that the age of childhood-sentiment has produced some delightful books . . . but it has also produced a dreadful undergrowth of stories written or adapted to what was or is conceived to be the measure of children’s minds and needs. The old stories are mollified or bowdlerized, instead of being reserved; the imitations are often merely silly, Pigwiggenry without even the intrigue; or patronizing; or (deadliest of all) covertly sniggering, with an eye on the other grown-ups present.
For anyone to take quality stories and bowdlerize them to fit the mood of millennial moviegoers, as the new Goosebumps film has done with R.L. Stine’s stories, is a crime against human imagination.
My appetite for scary stories didn’t diminish when I outgrew my grade school Goosebumps books. I graduated to R. L. Stine’s “Fear Street” series, reading and re-reading books like Sunburn during my summer vacation and Silent Night during my Christmas vacation. Stine’s books, to my mind, were far superior to the Goosebumps television series, which aired from 1995-1998 and marked the beginning of an onslaught of TV shows marketed to tweens and teens. I never liked the show, opting for the much better written and acted Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Nickelodeon. Aside from the obvious corniness that the televised Goosebumps brought to the scary storytelling, I knew nothing could compare to the magic those stories sparked in my imagination.
In the song “Wake Up” by indie rock superstars Arcade Fire, the artists issue a clarion call to cultivate the creative imagination of children. The lyrics warn children not to lose heart, lest they grow up to become what C. S. Lewis called in The Abolition of Man “men without chests:”
Now that I’m older/My heart’s colder/And I can see that it’s a lie
If the children don’t grow up/Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.
The issue today is not that our children will grow up to become heartless adults who have forgotten the magic of their childhood adventures. The crisis of contemporary childhood is that we are, little by little and often unwittingly, destroying the imagination of youth. The cultivation of the human imagination starts in childhood and yet most of the films produced for children today, even those based on excellent books, are the enemy of enchantment. If all Hollywood can manage to offer young adults are trivialized plots (often featuring inappropriately sexualized characters) what sort of message are we sending to our children?
In the trailer for the new Goosebumps movie, the female character, Hannah, is shown not as an adventurous, imaginative girl, but as a potential romantic interest. The issue here is not sexism, as some critics have claimed; it is the sexualization of our children. From what I recall, having read all of the Goosebumps books, there were no romances that developed between the male and female protagonists in the stories. There were, however, friendships, the kind we want children to have examples of both in literature and in life.
Rather than stories of real danger, mystery, and adventure, we get slapstick scary movies for kids that trivialize the timeless tradition of the ghost story and turn tweens into merely potential romantic conquests for each other. Nothing in the film adaption of Stine’s stories offers glimpses of Tolkien’s idea of enchantment; few of the pixelated villains inspire genuine fear. I am both surprised and disappointed that Stine has not only opted to authorize such an adaption of his beloved series, but that he agreed to make a cameo appearance in it.
Mysteries, friendships, adventure, sacrifice: these are the things I remember as a young girl who spent afternoons curled up in my inflatable chair, reading favorites from Nancy Drew to classics like Great Expectations. I would spend hours playing with my Lego sets and listening to audiotaped tales like A Shocker on Shock Street and Deep Trouble on my cassette player—the only digital medium that could make Stine’s stories as scary, if not scarier, than reading them. These books spoke to me—a kid coming of age in the 1990s, playing outside with the boys until the sun set, when my mom would call the neighbors to send me back home for bed. The Goosebumps tales were an important part of that youth: they represented adventure, but also the very real experience of friendship, of boys and girls telling stories and scaring each other for fun. That’s what the new Goosebumps movie misses: an opportunity to remind us all that there is nothing more enchanting than creating and sharing an imaginary world of stories with friends.
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