“I don’t know what it’s like to be scared!” R.L Stine on horror, adaptations and Goosebumps

“I never wanted to be scary!” laughs author Robert Stine when I sat down with him late last year at the Lucca Comic Books & Games festival in Italy. “I never planned for it [but] people like to be scared. Thank God!”

Known to you and me as R.L. Stine, ‘scary’ is certainly the name of the game for him, having sold 400 million copies of his popular book series, Goosebumps, globally. Not to mention his other horror book series Fear Street, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, Nightmare Hour, and The Nightmare Room.

Which is why it’s surprising to find out that it was actually comedy that started him off on his writing journey. “I was always funny,” he admits. “I did a humour magazine for Scholastic called Bananas for 10 years. And I wrote a whole bunch of joke books.

“Then I did this first scary teen novel called Blind Date and it was the number one bestseller! I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ So I’d go to schools, because I didn’t understand it, and I’d say, ‘Why do you like these books?’ and every time they said, ‘We like to be scared!’”

We certainly do. Goosebumps has been a mainstay of children’s literature since the 1990s. The first of which – incidentally – was titled ‘Welcome to Dead House’, released in July 1992. Since then, the Goosepumps series has become the second-best-selling book series in history (behind Harry Potter) and has been translated into 35 languages.

Yes, Stine’s mixture of horror and humour in his novels certainly continues to catch the attention of readers, though it’s no surprise to him that the two genres mix so well together. “They’re the same visceral reaction,” he nods. “I think they’re very closely tied. When you sneak up behind somebody and you go ‘boo!’, the first thing they do is gasp, and then they laugh. It’s tied together. Or when you go to an amusement park and you walk up to the roller coaster, you hear people laughing and screaming at the same time. I think it’s the same reaction.”

With such an aptitude for making things scary, the big question is: What scares Stine? “I have something wrong with my brain!” he laughs. “No, really, I don’t get scared by scary movies or scary books. People always come up to me and they say ‘after I read your book, I had to turn on all the lights. I locked all the doors I could.’ I’ve never had that feeling. I don’t know what it’s like to be scared by a book or a movie!”

Well that makes one of us. We’re sure plenty of you remember being curled up with a Goosebumps book, reading about babysitters, or ventriloquist dummies, or creepy masks. Yes Stine has been scaring kids for decades and he lets us in on his writing process for getting into the minds of young people… “You choose an age that you’re writing for, always,” he reveals. “If I picture a ten-year-old kid, I’m writing middle grade, or if I’m writing older, I picture a 17-year-old teenager.

“I know a lot about vocabulary,” he continues. “I’ve studied vocabulary and reading levels before I started writing books, actually, so I know that to make a Goosebumps book, I keep it at a fifth-grade level. I know how to do that.”

Indeed, Stine has written for plenty of age groups (he’s even written a few adult books, don’t you know,) but it’s that younger demographic that remains his favourite. “The seven to eleven year olds, they’re wonderful,” he nods when I ask him what his favourite age to write for is. “That’s a great age group. Those middle-grade readers are really my readers. I don’t know why anyone would want to write for adults. Seriously. Because you don’t hear from them. They’re too busy. They don’t care about authors!”

As if scaring the bejeezus out of young readers wasn’t enough, the Goosebumps series proved so popular that they got their little claws into other mediums too. First with the kids TV series in 1995 (if that theme tune isn’t in your head right now then you’re a better person than I am. Or, you know, in a different age bracket), and then with the movie starring Jack Black in 2015 and now more recently an anthology TV show on Disney+, the most recent of which starred David Schwimmer. Oh, and of course there’s the Fear Street adaptations for Netflix, plus a generous sprinkle of TV movies. The list really does go on.

For Stine, when asked about those adaptations, it’s clear he’s thrilled and humbled about them all (“I’m so lucky, I’ve had so many TV things and now we’re working on other things…”), though when I ask him to pick just one, he does have an answer: “I think the first Goosebumps movie with Jack Black,” he reveals. “That’s really one of my favourites. Jack and I are like twins, right? It was a great experience, and I’m very proud of that film.”

Ah yes, the Goosebumps movie where Jack Black plays R.L. Stine himself, a casting choice that Stine says he thought was “wonderful”.

“I’ll tell you the truth…” he begins, prepping me for a little story. In fact, speaking to Stine for even an hour, it’s clear he’s a born storyteller. The afternoon with him is peppered with anecdotes, side stories and inside jokes. It’s glorious.

Anyways, back to the story… “When we were trying to figure out who should play me in the film, I first asked my son: ‘Who do you think should play me in the Goosebumps movie?’

“And he said: ‘Morgan Freeman’.

“Not really helpful.

“But a lot of people on Facebook and Twitter said: ‘Well, you should play yourself. Who knows you better than you? You should play yourself in the movie.’

“So I went to my wife, Jane, and I said: ‘Jane, you know, a lot of people think I should play myself in the movie…’

“And she said: ‘You’re too old to play yourself!’.

“How scary is that? How horrible! Too old to play yourself… And of course, it’s true.”

True or not, the Goosebumps movie did exceptionally well, grossing a worldwide box office total of $150.2 million, against a budget of $58 million. Plus getting its own sequel, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, in 2018.

But with all those adaptations swirling in popular culture, is there one that’s escaped the clutches of visual media? Is there a story of his that he’d like to see adapted? “I don’t know…” he ponders. “I did these four books about the babysitter (poor Jenny, she should have gotten another job) and all these kids write to me saying, ‘I’ll never babysit again’. We’re working on that for a movie, but I don’t have anything really that I’d like to see.”

To be fair, there really is a lot to choose from. There are 62 books in the original Goosebumps books series alone. So where does Stine get all these ideas from? The answer might surprise you. Reader beware…

“I don’t get ideas!” he says (we told you). “I’ve done every story. There’s nothing left. So what I do is I just think of titles. I don’t try to think of ideas. I try to think of a good title. The one I was just working on before I came here is a Goosebumps called The Last Sleepover. So I had the title, and then that title leads me to the story. So what happens? Someone has a sleepover, and maybe they die and become a ghost, or something.

“Every title just leads me to the idea. It’s kind of backwards for most authors. They usually get an idea first, and then start to write, and then think of the title. But I can’t work on anything till I have the title!”

We just hope Stine’s next title isn’t ‘SciFiNow article of horror’.

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[Main image courtesy of Lucca Comics & Games]