For over 30 years, Bumps books have scared the brainless children. Children’s gateway to the world of horror novels, this RL Stine mega-franchise has maintained its place as one of the best-selling book series of all time. These books combined just the right amount of kid-friendly spookiness and humor, complete with twist endings that always leave readers wanting more.
Bumps you’re not familiar with screen adaptations, including a four-season live-action series on Fox Kids in the mid-’90s, and two movies with Jack Black from a few years ago. This Halloween season, Bumps is back with a new show streaming live on Disney+ and Hulu, promising grown-up horror while staying true to the original material. The series follows five high school kids who investigate the death of a teenager three decades ago, whose home a new English teacher has just moved into.
Unlike its 90’s counterpart, this modern adaptation will be a 10-part spine-chilling mini-series, with the first five chapters dropping on October 13, and subsequent episodes being added weekly. Instead of turning a single book into a 30-minute mini-movie, the new series takes inspiration from them, incorporating those elements into a cohesive narrative over the course of the show.
According to the official press release from Scholastic, the show draws from five books, but the newly revealed episode titles feature nearly every fan favorite from all 62 original books, with links to all 230+ books in this extended franchise.
Which one Bumps What books can viewers expect to see in the new show? Readers beware – you are in for a treat!
Official trailer for Bumps on Disney+ and Hulu
“Cheese Die!”
Throughout the trailer, we see Miles McKenna as James and Zack Morris as Isaiah causing trouble with a Polaroid camera. A developing story is taken from the fourth Bumps book, which shares the same name as the episode (a trend in all of these titles).
A group of friends find a cursed camera in a dilapidated house, but instead of capturing a picture of the present, it predicts a tragic future for whoever is photographed. Horror movies and cameras are always a bad mix, whether it’s stills or videos. It’s also a reminder – never take things you find in abandoned houses, unless you want to be a character in an RL Stine book, and you know how they end up.
“The Haunted Mask”
Briefly seen in the trailer is a life-like human face affixed to a wooden plaque. It’s a mask, but any kind. It is a recurring haunted phenomenon that can be seen everywhere Bumps franchise. These self-conscious parasitic masks were created by a mysterious shopkeeper, hungry to be worn so he can completely take over the wearer’s body.
“The Haunted Mask” was 11th The book in the series is also among the most popular adaptations in different media. In addition to being one of the few books to have a direct sequel (“The Haunted Mask II”), the mask has appeared in recent live-action movies, was a feature in a 2015 video game, and returned to the books ten years later in “The Scream of the Haunted Mask.”
What brought them all together was Carly Beth Caldwell, the kid who beat them in the saga’s first entry back in 1993. Don’t be alarmed if that name appears again in this new edition!
“The Cuckoo Clock of Doom”
Cuckoo clocks are a classic horror trope, a loud machine that lulls the audience into a false sense of security, just in time for the scares that come off the furniture. On the 28thth The Goosebumps book, “The Cuckoo Clock of Doom,” answered that propaganda is turned on its head by being a sinister time travel device that can take years back, and set back human existence.
In the trailer for the new series, James and Isiah were seen playing with the cursed camera, but the consequences of that may not have been revealed. The next scene shows a group of those two characters in a cave, which means that those two may be involved in some time-shifting problems because of the clock.
Ana Yi Puig as Isabella from “The Cuckoo Clock of Doom”
Disney / David Astorga
“Go Eat Worms”
They are 21St Bumps The book was a play on the 1973 children’s book by Thomas Rockwell, “How to Eat Fried Worms.” The difference was that the main character in Stine’s version was not paid $50 to devour the moving bugs, and instead “supernaturally” found their way into clothes and food.
Although the real cause of this ruckus was not actually worms seeking revenge, the book ended with a giant worm exploding on the ground, one of the most surreal third acts in the franchise. The trailer doesn’t show much in the way of bugs, but be prepared for some potential surprises if the show follows any scenes from the book, unless you don’t mind getting a half-bitten worm in your sandwich.
“Reader Beware” / “Give Yourself Goosebumps”
The fifth and seventh episodes of the new series are not named in a particular order, but the entire sub-series in Bumps a literary universe. “Reader Note” – apart from what RL Stine used to introduce some of his 90s games – was the tagline “Give Yourself the Bumps”.
A total of 50 volumes, these were interactive books that offered readers many ways to control the outcome of events. Think “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, but with titles like “Welcome to the Museum of Evil,” “Escape from Camp Run-For-Your-Life,” and “Secret Agent Grandma.” A screenshot from the episode shows children captured with glowing, dark eyes while listening to a mysterious figure read from a mystical tome, so perhaps the youngsters will be unknowingly pulling a series of events. Speaking of cables…
“Night of the Living Dummy”
Nothing can be done under slimy Bumps an umbrella without Slappy the Dummy making an appearance!
The sixth and ninth episodes of the 2023 TV series share titles, and the last one is Part 2 of this story. All of the “Night of the Living Dummy” books star Slappy, the de facto face of the Bumps franchise. He released the seventh book of the series in 1993, and returned many times over the years to torment innocent children, including films and TV series of the 90s. Slappy was so popular that the villain’s dummy even had his own book series, “SlappyWorld.”
Dolls can be terrifying to children, and Stine admitted in her autobiography that the character stems from her hatred of dolls, in particular. Pinocchio. He later regained control of that fear by using his dummy to scare his brother, building time for Stine on his way to writing horror books.
“You Can’t Scare Me”
15th The book in the original series, “You Can’t Scare Me” has my favorite cover by Tim Jacobus, giving readers a glimpse of the horrors within its pages. This one features the Mud Monsters, the reanimated corpses of old townspeople who drowned in a flood in the Greene Forest, and rise once a year to take revenge on those who refuse to help.
There are no dirty zombies to be found in the trailer, so this may be in name only, but I won’t be disappointed if I see these dirty golems storming through the forest once in the middle of the series.
A cast of high school kids gets into trouble in the episode “Give Them Bumps”
Disney / David Astorga
“Welcome to Horrorland”
The conclusion of the 2023 series brings us to another pillar in Bumps universe, HorrorLand!
This ghoulish theme park was first released in the sixteenth book in the series back in 1994 and is another popular part of the franchise. Run by HorrorLand Horrors, vicious monsters that can only be defeated by squashing them, this is far from the happiest place on earth. Their motto is “Where Nightmares Come Alive!” and includes rides such as The Coffin Cruise, Ferris Squeal, and Wheel of Misfortune.
Without a direct sequel, this volume has been adapted over the years into a board game, a comic, three different video games, a two-part episode about the 90’s show, and it came out of its series that ended by bringing together notable characters from previous books to take over the center. This marked the first serialized fiction of Stine’s Bumps franchise, a fitting title to close this new series, which also follows a single narrative between the different terrifying events that these five high school kids compete against.
Earlier this May, a separate series by RL Stine, Just over hereit was released on Disney+ along with many other shows and movies at a time when many streaming platforms were shedding their content. Disney seems to be betting on this one, with a release that includes the first two episodes airing as part of Freeform’s “31 Nights of Halloween” on the same night it launches online. A new Disney+ is possible Bumps could be the 2023 version of Wednesday – a great scary time for local TV with just the right amount of nostalgia, ready to scare and entertain audiences of all ages.
Bumps streams are open Disney+ again Hulu.
This article was originally published
