Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

I'm powered by worms, I can do anything!

In this episode we talked about the first half of the Goosebumps series from 2023, streaming on Disney Plus, as well as some of the original episodes from the Goosebumps TV series that ran between 1995-8.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

The song excerpt is 'Slappy' by The Tiger Lillies.

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Wybray and today we're talking about the Goosebumps TV series from 2023 and the corresponding episodes from the ‘90s series. Enjoy!

Adam Hello Ren, ye old skipper, me lad.

Ren Adam, you salty sea dog! Back again.

Adam We’re back. We're back again, back with the bad behaviour. Sorry, I'm very tired. It's been the end of a long half term, Ren.

Ren Yeah,I don't really have an excuse.

Adam You don't need an excuse! I know you once compared yourself to the dormouse in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Ren Yeah, still very apt. Just constitutionally sleepy.

Adam Yeah, constitutionally sleepy and constitutionally creepy! Because we are discussing. The 2023 revival of Goosebumps!

Ren Yeah, at least part one of the series.

Adam At least part one. It’s a bit of a well, it's not a mammoth task, there's only 10 episodes, but it's actually quite a rich text. There's a lot to talk about, I think.

Ren Yeah, there's a lot going on. And they're 40 minute episodes, and we wanted to go back and compare some of them to the original ones as well —

Adam Some of them, all of them Ren!I I've dutifully watched every one of the ‘90s originals just as I assume you've dutifully read all of the the books.

Ren I have not. I'm sorry, I only read —

Adam Yeah, I wasn't expecting that.

Ren I read Say Cheese and Die. But yeah we haven't done a lot of goosebumps on this podcast. We did one kind of early on —

Adam We did the Werewolf of Fever swamp.

Ren Yeah. There's like not a lot to say about them?

Adam Oh, well, I don't know about that. There's quite a lot of textures.

Ren Yeah, they're very straightforward though. The Goosebumps books.

Adam I mean, I think the prose style is quite straightforward. And obviously a lot of the books’ premise is a kid moves into a new neighbourhood. And they have a friend and then something spooky happens. And obviously there's only so many times that you can have a chapter cliffhanger of “Oh my, a terrible monster appeared.” And then it was: a dog wearing a mask, or my brother wearing a mask, or a lamp post wearing a mask!

Ren Say Cheese and Die, did have a dog. It wasn’t wearing a mask, it was just a dog.

Adam Yeah, but what was it at the end of the chapter?

Ren It was, yeah. It was like a dark shadow appears!

Adam Because I I think that's RL Stein's probably most significant literary innovation — is the chapter cliffhanger. Even if the chapters just one paragraph long, it's not too short to have a cliffhanger.

Ren That's true. Yeah, it's very efficient in getting as many cliffhangers in there as possible.

Adam A craggy terrain of literature.

Ren That's a texture in itself. Yeah, so. Say Cheese and Die is like the 4th book in the Goosebumps series from 1992. It's quite an early one, and that's that's the one that starts off this this 2023 Goosebumps series.

So what they did for this series is turn it from an anthology show into something with an ongoing narrative. So we have this group of present day teens who are having spooky things happen to them and as the series goes on, they start to figure out the connections between these events and how they're related to their parents, who were teenagers in the early ‘90s.

Adam I mean, this is on Disney Plus, so it is how how these objects and event all exist within the Goosebumps-verse or the Stein-verse or whatever you want to call it, I suppose.

Yeah, and I guess like serialised TV in the age of Netflix is the norm, right? Like there are still the occasional anthologies, like The Twilight Zone was brought back by Jordan Peele and in Britain we've got Inside No.9
But most TV obviously is serialised. This is even more serialised than something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So far I don't think there have been any stand alone Monster of the Week episodes. It's sort of like Haunted or Evil Object of the Week but they are very much connected.

Ren Yeah. They're all connected by this house where a teenage boy died in a house fire in 1993.

Adam This whole setup is quite a funny joke at the expense of millennial viewers, I think. Right, because. The episode starts with this sort of grungy, very ‘90s goth. And I was like, OK, yeah, I can get behind this guy as a protagonist. Sure. Goth feels.

And then you've got Drive by R.E.M. on on the soundtrack. And I'm like, yeah, ‘90s music. I'm a millennial. I like R.E.M! So, you know, I was all set up. And then he's killed in the first few minutes and we jump forward into the scary and bewildering 2023 and you've got all this like hippity-hop pop music on the soundtrack. No more R.E.M. And it's like, screw you, millennial old man! You thought you were gonna get some white boy goth protagonist and R.E.M.? No Sir!

I don't know. I thought it was quite funny because it did feel like it was deliberately making fun of millennial viewers!

Ren Yeah. It's not your Goosebumps ‘90s nostalgia for your family in 2023.

Adam Yeah, yeah, it's not not really a nostalgia fest. Most of these stories are quite rewritten, so I know you read say Cheese and Die, but presumably the episode’s pretty different from the book.

Ren Yeah, so I think Say Cheese and Die maybe got a bit short shrift being the opening of the series because it's doing all of the set up for what this series is going to be, and introducing the characters and everything.

So there isn't actually a lot of time with the camera that causes terrible things to happen.

Adam Which is the premise of the book, right?

Ren Yeah, so in the in the book it's very similar to the to the original TV episode. A group of kids break into an old house that's going to be torn down, but it's being somewhat inhabited by a man called Spidey. And and they find this camera in the basement and it’s a kind of Polaroid type camera but when the photos develop they show accidents and odd things happening to the people in the photos.

Adam So my my memory of the cover is that it's a kind of ghoulish tableau of a family BBQ, but all the family members are skeletons?

Ren Yes. I found that cover too scary as a kid, so I didn't ever read Say Cheese and die.

Adam I mean, to be fair, the skeletons look like they're having a nice time of it, right? I can't imagine the BBQ slips down easy if you're a skeleton.

Ren They're quite cute in the in the TV episode when he has a dream about the skeletons of his family.

Adam Yeah. Did you watch the TV episode then?

Ren I did, yeah.

Adam I mean, it is cheesy. It has a young Ryan Gosling in the main role. But it’s all canted angles and ‘90s longing. Like I don't know, I kind of loved the art direction. I've written down that it reminds me of Sega World, the garish London arcade of my childhood.

Ren Yeah, I love the camera.

Adam Oh, the camera itself. Yeah, it looks weird doesn't it?

Ren Yeah, in the book all it said of the camera is “It was large and surprisingly heavy with a long lens”. There's no indication that it's a particularly abnormal looking camera, but in the episode, well, I think one of the kids says like it looks like a toaster. And it kind of looks like a novelty Batmobile toaster. It's got these fins on it.

Adam Yeah, that's it. It looks like some kind of strange Futurist construction that some weird 1930s artist it would come up with.

Ren Yeah, and it's enormous! Which made me laugh when they get chased out of the basement and they're like, oh, you still have the camera? and Ryan Gosling's like, “I didn't notice I had it”.

Adam Lugging it about with him, yeah.

Adam But pretty cool soundtrack too. I thought, you know, I love the kind of queasy synthesiser music.

Ren Oh yeah, I'd forgotten how good the theme tune is as well.

Adam Oh yeah, Goosebumps original theme tune is amazing. It's really neat.

(Original Goosebumps theme plays)

I mean, something I've noticed you wouldn't get today is I think the family are eating veal.

Ren Oh yeah, I did notice that. That was in the book as well. Yeah, I don't think people generally advertise their veal eating.

Adam No, I mean, I don't. I don't eat it or advertise it because I'm not — yeah, it sounds very shifty. It sounds like I eat a lot of veal now, but that's not the case.

Weirdly, little digression, I’ve never actually seen vegetarian or vegan veal. Maybe there's a corner in the market, you know, you get all these vegan bacon and, vegan chicken but vegan veal, never seen it. I don't know if you need to add in suffering to make it, if that is the appeal. I don't know. I've never tried it.

But yeah, there you go. If any of you listeners want to corner that market, please credit us and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts saying: Thanks for the veal bucks!

Ren And yeah, so in the book continues to show disastrous things happening like the main character takes a photo of his dad's new car and it shows it all buckled and crushed, and then his dad gets in a car accident. They don't really go into it in the episode, but there's some discussion of like, oh, does the camera show the future or does it cause bad things to happen, you know?

Adam Did you did you decide on which one?

Ren Oh yeah. So the back story that's revealed at the end is that Spidey's real name is Doctor Fritz Fredericks and his lab partner, who dabbled in dark magic invented this camera. Spidey stole it hoping to make his fortune, and in retaliation the lab partner cursed it. So I think the camera does cause the bad things to happen because it has been cursed by a dark magician.

Adam And in the original episode, Spidey ends up trapped inside the camera.

Ren Yeah. I don't think. I don't think we're entirely sure what happens at the end of the book. No we do know what happens! They take a photo of Spidey that shows him dead, but Spidey's so terrified of having his photo taken by this cursed camera that he dies of fright.

Adam Clever, hoisted by his own petard.

Ren So, yeah, that's the original story. Not a lot of that makes it into the new episode.

Adam Well, no. The episode has to establish its — young cast? I don't know how young they are, I’m no good with age anymore.

I guess they're they're possibly teenagers — are they actually teenagers? I didn't look up the cast.

Ren Well, one of them’s a YouTuber.

Adam Okay, they certainly seem to have a lot of life and vitality. They look like their bodies aren't falling apart. So, you know, I couldn't relate to them. But.

Ren I feel like they're meant to be about 17.

Adam OK, yeah, I think that's how old they are. Finishing off high school, I guess. So who are our characters?

Ren OK, so we have Isaiah, who's the protagonist, they take it in turns to have an episode that's centred around them and Isaiah is the the main guy in Say Cheese and Die. He's the one who finds the camera and he's a football player, star player guy. Popular dude.

Adam Quite a straight up popular, dude.

Ren Yeah. His best friend is James, who is the goofy one and who's also gay.

Adam Looks a bit like a young Simon Hanselmann. The writer of the Meg and Mogg comic books, I thought. I mean, obscure reference, but he does.

Ren There's Margot, who is Isaiah's neighbour. They've been neighbours and friends going back a long way.

Adam Is Margot meant to be a nerd? Right? Because to me, Margot seemed really cool.

Ren Meant to be a nerd?

Adam Yeah. OK, so people don't seem to like Margot, right? I might have got muddled about this.

Ren In the first episode, they definitely don't.

Adam Yeah. And I was like, but Margot seems cool? Like, I don't get people insulting Margot. I didn't really get it.

Ren Well, there's also Isaiah's girlfriend Allison, who isn't necessarily one of the core cast, but she definitely doesn't like Margot. Because she's jealous. But I don't really apart from her what people’s beef is with Margot. She’s a little awkward, I guess.

Adam But like, in a cool way. This isn't like the kind of nerdy kid you'd get in ’90s Goosebumps. Like, say, the protagonist of the Haunted Mask, for instance.

Carly Beth in the haunted mask is really established as a very awkward bullied girl who only has one friend. I don't know maybe the awkward kids of today are just of a higher calibre, you know?

Ren Her dad is the guidance counsellor at the school as well.

Adam That's true. And he's pretty awkward, I guess. Maybe it's that. I don't know.

Ren Isabella is kind of grouchy and a photographer. And Lucas is the one who keeps trying to fling himself off buildings for videos and things?

Adam Yeah, like Lucas is a quite odd character because it's like he's wandered in from Dazed and Confused or something. He does feel like a ‘90s character, but like from a ‘90s teen film. He feels quite out of place, I think, with the rest of the cast.

Ren Yeah, they're all quite with it and quippy and he's just —

Adam He just likes worms.

Ren He just likes worms. Yeah, so, I think each of those characters get an episode. Isaiah's is Say Cheese and Die, Isabella gets The Haunted Mask. James is surrounded by his own clones in The Cuckoo Clock of Doom and Lucas eats worms in Go Eat Worms.

Adam I really don't know why they adapted Go Eat Worms, I will say, because it's really not a classic Goosebumps! I vaguely remembered the title, couldn't remember what it was about at all, and I watched it and it’s dire. It's really low tier goosebumps, there’s a lot of better ones they could have adapted. So I don't know why they went with that one.

Ren Well, yeah, so all of these things originate from the Biddle house, which is the house with the angsty teen at the beginning. So have a party there.

Adam Who died in a fire.

Ren Yes. So there’s a new owner moving into this house that's been empty for 30 years and he's inherited it, they've found he's a long lost great relation of some kind and he's moving in.

Adam He's called Nathan, played by Justin Long and my note says “I like this Nathan fella!”. I quite liked him. He turns out to be an English teacher as well and he tries to make jokes to placate the teenagers, and they're just kind of confused by him or scornful. And I was like, I relate to that. I can relate to this character.

Ren Yeah, he accidentally activates the sealed basement with his own blood as he's trying to see what's down there. Which turns out to be bad, in fact.

I think it's Isaiah's Dad is working on the house? So they're like, oh, we need a place for a party because my mom said we can't have it here. I know. Let's go and have it in in the Biddle house. So they go and have this Halloween party in the house.

Adam And that's about halfway into the episode. And I'd say that's sort of when the plot kicks in. It feels more like a drama up to that point, there are spooky moments in the show, but I think — obviously in the original Goosebumps TV series Say Cheese and Die is a longer feature length episode.

That might literally be why they they started with it because I think that's the first episode of the original Goosebumps TV show as well. But normally each episode's about 20 minutes, so obviously a lot more condensed, so you get more spooky moments per minute.

Compared to, you know, this has that longer running time and so it uses a lot of that for exposition and character development. And that does mean it feels a lot more lived in, obviously it's a a classier proposition than the original Goosebumps by far. The special effects are far less shonky, as you'd expect. But sometimes I do think that kills the atmosphere a bit. You do have quite a lot of character drama and it's not badly written character drama. It's pretty decent and the cast are decent. But it does sometimes kill the atmosphere, I think.

Ren Yeah, I think particularly with Say Cheese and Die, you don't really get much of the sense of the horror. You know, it's a creepy concept that this camera causes horrible things to happen to people if you take photos of them. But I don't really think you get the impact of that because there's so much going on.

Adam Yeah. I mean, I've tried to rank the episodes against each other in which one's strongest? And I reckon 50/50 judiciously on this one. I mean, the original isn't badly directed, it's just very extra. It's very ‘90s. You know why use a regular camera angle when you can use a canted camera angle! So, you know, the new one certainly is slicker, but I do think the original has more of a sense of panic and escalation, as these bad photos seem to be leading the character to a terrible fate, whereas I did feel that it doesn't reach quite the same pace in the new one.

Ren Isaiah can't show the photos to anyone, they just sort of appear blank when he tries to show them to people. So they kind of get this kind of psychological horror of him knowing that there's something wrong with this camera and not being able to explain it to anyone.

Adam Get gaslit by a camera!

Ren Yeah, yeah. His friend James takes a photo of him in retaliation for Isaiah causing him to crash his car —

Adam Or scratch his car, or something.

Ren Yeah, and and it shows him breaking his arm, lying on the ground in pain at the football game. And and so at this game he sees this burning ghost of Harold Biddle, the teen. Which is a reoccurring vision that appears to the characters. And then he does indeed break his arm. And crucially, also at the end of that end of that episode, Mr Bratt, the English teacher swallows the ghost of Harold Biddle.

Adam The mechanics of which are a bit confusing, right? Like. Because at first I thought, OK, he's possessed so Biddle's just inhabiting him. But at times it seems that he does see Biddle as his reflection when he looks in mirrors, although it talks to him without him talking. But other times it felt more like he was akin to Renfield in Dracula, more like under the thrall of Biddle and doing what Biddle wanted him to do, but not actually Biddle himself. If that makes sense.

Ren Yeah, it is a bit isn't a bit unclear on that, I think.

Adam Yeah. I'll say my my only disappointment really with the episode. Is there are no super dorky Halloween costumes? Or even very creepy Halloween costumes! I just kind of feel like if you're doing a spooky show and you've got a Halloween party, like you should have some real fun with the costumes.

Ren Yeah, that's a good point. I don't even remember them apart from that James is a sexy cat. They weren't very exciting, were they?

Adam If you compare it to something like Buffy, I feel like, you know, in a Buffy Halloween episode, they’ll have lots of fun with the costumes and I thought that was a bit of a shame. There are times where I feel like the show could do with being a bit wackier almost.

Ren Yeah, I did sometimes find like when it's like. we're watching a scene of like two adults in their ‘40s, like discussing their relationship troubles and like: This is Goosebumps?

Adam Yeah, considering it's Goosebumps it takes itself kind of seriously at times! Obviously we won't talk about him in great detail until our next episode, but a lot of the first half of this season is centred around the return of Slappy. But Slappy is very rarely mentioned by name.

So Slappy is the evil ventriloquist dummy from the original Goosebumps, and I found it really odd and kind of funny that they talk about Slappy in these sort of weirdly reverential hushed tones. Like: He is soon to return!

Ren They prolong the reveal it has Bratt/Biddle saying “I need to find him”. And the adults are like: “He’s looking for him” and you gradually realise that this is going to be Slappy.

Adam It's just because I'm pretty sure in the original Return of the Living Dummy, Slappy, in the book at least, gets defeated by being pushed onto his back and can't get back up because he's a wooden dummy. He can't bend his legs. And, you know, I'm not sure if that's quite the kind of portentous threat that Slappy's being presented as.

Ren Well, yeah, we'll get to Slappy.

Adam And it's, it's not a bad start, right? You know, it's a decent first episode. It does have to do a fair bit of heavy lifting with exposition. You know, you know, all the cast are strong. It's very competently directed.

Ren The dialogue's quite fun. I enjoyed Margot awkwardly explaining that you're not actually meant to shake Polaroids. That was quite fun.

Adam Oh, yeah. There was a nice reference to Hey Ya, they throw us millennials a bone.

Ren They do, they do.

Adam Those moments where you’re like, (doddering old timer voice) “Oh, I know what you're talking about! Those young teenagers watching won\t have got that reference!”

Yeah, and they have an entertaining, quite convincingly Zoomer discussion about whether no-one sucks or not, which was quite good.

Ren What was that?

Adam So Lucas, I think it's Lucas. One of the guys is like, yeah, well, really, no-one sucks. And then probably Margot is like, really, no-one sucks? Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn't suck? Is that what you're saying? And Lucas is like well, no, he sucks. That was quite funny.

The humour is a bit quippy, got that kind of Joss Whedon snarky teenagers thing going on. But most of the lines work.

Ren So, The Haunted Mask then is the second episode. We saw a cameo of the mask in the first episode and this is going back over the same timeline so we're returning to the party with Isabella this time. Who feels like a bit of an outsider and she finds this mask in the Biddle house and when she puts it on it fills her with confidence.

Adam It's quite a different dynamic to the original. So this is the only case where I genuinely think that the ‘90s episode is superior. And that's partly because of the performance of Kathryn Long, now a drama teacher, from checking her IMDb who plays Carly Beth who is the girl who wears the mask in the original.

She goes full goblin, it’s a really great performance. So she's this kid who's horribly bullied — worms make their their first entrance in this, some horrid bullies like put a worm in her sandwich. And this actually this came up in a Pushing up Roses episode on YouTube that I watched about it and apparently she insisted that she actually eat the worm. For the filming, as a kid she just went full method like Nicholas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss. So the disgust on her face is real.

Ren Wow.

Adam So yeah, it's quite harrowing actually, like she's really horribly bullied and she wears the mask because she wants to scare the people who bullied her basically. And she goes full goblin. The mask itself is pretty monstrous, the one in the new Haunted Mask is more like a Noh theatre mask almost, it's quite blank.
Whereas this is very much a monster mask. And when she wears it, she has this maniacal cackle and starts prancing about with gleeful evil basically. She goes Trick or Treating and snaps at these two like adorable little kids. She says something horrible to both of them and then laughs and throws sweets at the house.

(Clip from the ‘90s Haunted Mask episode:
Kid: I don't like the other one, Mom, too scary.
Mom: Oh, it's just a funny mask, hun, don't be afraid.
Carly Beth: You better watch what you say to me if you know it's good for ya!
Mom: Listen, don't frighten her like that, she's just a little girl.
Carly Beth: Aww, isn't that too bad?
Mom: Hey, cut it out!
Carly Beth: You’ll get what's coming for you too!
Mom: You tell your sick little friend that I'm going to call the police!)

Yeah, and there's some great lines as the mask takes her over. She can't remove it and she says: “There's there's no line between the mask and my skin”. And then when she's looking at herself, she keeps shouting, “Those aren't my eyes, those aren't my eyes!”

Ren Ooh, really spooky.

Adam Yeah, I'd actually recommend watching this, this one, it's surprisingly good, actually. Properly shonkingly disturbing special effects of floating mask heads, which were great.

Oh, and there’s a scene with her original costume for Halloween, her mum is really supportive, but I guess maybe goes about things the wrong way. So makes a sort of sculpture of her own head and it looks just like He Man. And this isn't just me. So I thought that and I was like, whoa, that really looks like He Man.
And I went on YouTube to watch the episode and the top voted comment was people saying that looks like He Man. Really does. Poor girl.

And her mom gives her this adorable duckling costume to wear, but obviously she wants to be scary. So after being bullied she goes to her room and there’s this really intense scene where she tears up this fluffy duckling costume while laughing and crying at the same time. Really good, really intense acting! So yeah, Kathryn Long, I salute you because that’s a really, really good child performance.

Ren Okay, well I will watch that!

Adam Yeah, let me know what you think because I really enjoyed it, actually.

Ren The new episode was, well --

Adam The mask isn't scary enough!

Ren Yeah, it kind of grins to itself.

Adam Yeah, that's nice. That's a nice little moment.

Ren It's kind of cool when she's trying to take it off and it really sticks to her face. There's a kind of creepy moment where the mask is stuck on her face and she's going all goblinus in her house and her little brother sees this creature in the house and tries to ring his sister on the phone. And then the phone goes off in this creature's pocket and he realises that it's her.

Adam That was good. That was a good creepy moment, actually. Yeah. Nice suspense there.

I just felt the original dynamic works much better, with this kid who's really bullied becoming a bully herself basically. I think a lot of kids can potentially relate to that, and it becomes more of an introvert/extrovert dynamic in the new one. There is an aspect of her becoming crueller, but it does seem more like she's someone who doesn't like to go out and then she becomes more confident. And I just found that a little bit more generic than the original dynamic which felt a bit edgier to be honest.

The original feels more uncomfortable, the bullying goes quite far and it manages to tap into how cruel kids can be in a way that I think would really work for child viewer. Spoiler, that's the only one where I thought that the ‘90s episode was stronger. But yeah, for me, The Haunted Mask, I've watched all of these original equivalents, and that was the only one where I was really impressed.

Ren Yeah. And so at the end of this episode, the kind of ongoing narrative part is that the parents come together to have a secret discussion and Isabella's taken over too, because she trashed the house in her goblin state. So she's taken over to James's house and she accidentally hits him with a pool ball and he explodes into yellow goo.

Adam Yeah! That’s my Texture of the Week.

Ren That is also my texture!

Adam Yeah, of course it is! Come on then.

(Sped up words and glitchy noise, bells)

Adam and Ren Texture of the Week!

Ren Yeah, so I didn't watch the original Cuckoo Clock of Doom episode, so you'll have to tell me this, but I found this yellow goo explosion… there was something very nostalgic about it for me.

Adam What's interesting is it's not in the original at all. Whatsoever. And in fact, the original episode has very little, really very little to do with the new episode.

So in the original, it's basically the main character, the boy Michael, his dad buys this cuckoo clock. And he's got a very bratty younger sister basically, who always gets away with teasing him and playing pranks and who ruins his birthday party. And so he winds the head of the cuckoo on the cuckoo clock and goes back in time.

So what happens is he gets younger and younger? And this is kind of a bit of a creepy idea, I suppose. Uh, so you know, he, twelve, but then he finds it's his sixth birthday party, but he's still got the mind of a twelve year old. And so he’s sat there with all these six year olds and treated as a six year old in the body of a six year old. So he's kind of almost like the only person with free will, right? Because he's gone back into the past and he knows what should happen and he's able to change it, I suppose.

Which is interesting. And there's a decent dream sequence where he's chased down a corridor by a grandfather clock with his sister's face, as the face of a cuckoo. Which was good.

Ren But no one explodes into yellow goo?

Adam No, no. Well, the thing is, with the new version, it's much more like a Groundhog Day scenario. Except every time James goes back, there's a duplicate. It splits into two universes or something like that. We've discussed William Sleater, the American Kid sci-fi writer before on the podcast, and he wrote a novella called The Duplicate in which a kid duplicates himself, but every copy is kind of nastier and more immoral and flatter than him. And actually it's kind of similar here that the duplicates are evil, basically. But yeah, yeah, there are no duplicates in the original at all.

Ren I really wonder what this yellow goo explosion is pinging off in my brain.

Adam Well, I mean, it's gunge isn't it? Its ‘90s gunge.

Ren Yeah, it is. I just, there's something about that hollow explosion.

Adam Oh my God. Maybe it happened to you!

Ren Yeah, maybe! But there's something in there with that.

Adam Oh, interesting. Did you have like some kind of traumatic paint-balling experience you've repressed?

Ren No, no, I’ve never been paintballing.

Adam I mean, I did once. My friend Kim from,
so you remember Kim, the secretary of comedy society?

Ren Yeah, yeah.

Adam When she got married, we went paintballing. And yeah, and a small child shot a paintball directly into my ear and it gave me really bad tinnitus and I was quite scared it was going to last forever. Yeah, yeah, it was quite painful.

Yeah, paint-balling was kind of fun, but I don't know, actually, it wasn't even that fun because now I think about it, we played two games and in the second game, I was trying to take the other team's base camp and I crawled deliberately really slowly. I crawled right around the perimeter and I was so slow and good at being hidden that actually the game finished. They had to go out and like, find me, like “Yeah, game’s finished, mate." So I didn't reach anyone. I was just slowly crawling through the grass.

But yeah, the characters have zero remorse about killing the duplicate James’s!

Ren Yeah they don't care at all. They're quite gleeful, in fact.

Adam Yeah, I thought so. But yeah, it's quite an exciting episode, it has a sort of showdown with these duplicates in his family's old mine 'cause, I don't know, his rich family own a mine or something!

Ren Yeah, the duplicates take real James prisoner in a mine shaft. And try and drive all his friends away from him, and his new boyfriend, who he Groundhog days at the party.

Adam Hmm, yes, James, be not proud. I thought that was a little bit skeezy of him.

Ren Yeah, he does the doing over the same conversation and taking notes and finding out that this guy is into UK football. So he finds out things about Arsenal to talk to him about.

Adam Which does work, but then the duplicates, well, I guess the duplicates just don't like being duplicates!

Ren Right. We don't really get a motivation from them.

Adam They're just hate James!

Ren But yeah, because he kept reliving the party he's still in his sexy cat costume so when he’s trying to get out of the mine hole, he psyches himself up by saying “You're a sexy cat, you can climb!” which I quite enjoyed.

Adam Yeah, that was fun. It was quite cute. And and they had Heads Will Roll by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs at the end of the episode. So all the millennials are going (doddery millennial voice) “Oh I remember them!”

Ren Did you notice, maybe it's in Go Eat Worms. Where James specifically has a dig at millennials.

Adam Yes, yes. And it's good though, because the writers recognise that all millennials are self loathing masochist basically. So you know, I thoroughly enjoyed all the digs at millennials.

Ren Yeah, he's like, oh, it's like when when millennials hear a word on TikTok, and then they repeat it. Jokes on you, I don't even go on Tiktok!

Adam I've been really winding up my base group recently at school because for top 10% of house
point winners are going on a trip to Pleasurewood Hills.

And so I keep just showing images of Pleasurewood Hills from the ‘90s. So. Basically back in 1994 TV host Noel Edmonds had a short residency at Pleasurewood Hills in which he presented basically a cheap version of Noel Edmond’s House Party live at Pleasurewood Hills with Mr Blobby. And they gunged members of the public on stage.

Ren Oh, wow. OK.

Adam Yeah. And there are some properly dismal-looking photos of this event. Somebody in a withered Mr Blobby suit on a dark stage with some poor members of the public being gunged.

So I keep showing images of this and being like, look, kids, it's Pleasurewood Hills. And they're like, oh, you're looking it look really bad, I'm not looking forward to it now! And I'm like, no, no, it's great. It's Pleasurewood Hills, we're going to meet Woody Bear! It really winds them up and it makes my day funnier. So, yeah. You can find some really naff pictures of Pleasurewood Hills. So I show these pictures and pretend that I think it's the greatest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, simple pleasures.

Oh God, talk about simple pleasures the next episode is Go Eat Worms, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I've written at the top of my notes for the 90s episode: ‘Utterly wrethced”. Like I hated it. I really really hate it. The old one.

I was originally going to do my textures as worms and then I was like, no, I'm not even going to do that to myself. It was horrid. like has. It's basically worm torture porn, this episode, like, you know, the horrid name given to Saw and all those really unpleasant 2000s horror films.

Its horrible kids doing horrible things to worms and then basically the worms take revenge. So, Evolution of Horror at the moment, for Evolution of Horror listeners of which I very much am, are currently doing a When Animals Attack season. And if this episode was any good, they could have included it in that. Because it's When Worms Attack, basically. There are fake worms, there's some real worms and some fake worms that look rubbish. Um, yeah, it's a really naff, unlikable episode. Disliked it a lot.

So yeah, Go Eat Worms 2023 basically takes one of the stupidest ever Goosebumps episodes and turns it into one of the darkest. Which is quite an odd move.

Ren Yeah, so this is the Lucas episode. He found some worms at the party in the Biddle house and he's keeping them in a tank. And in this one we get drama between the adults as Lucas's mum and Margot’s dad are revealed to be having an affair, or at least Lucas realises this and tells Margot. And then eats a worm.

Adam Yeah, fairly inexplicablly. I mean does he eat the worm to try to cheer her up? It was quite odd but he's written as quite an odd character, so it kind of worked.

Ren I think he was going to eat the worm, but then instead the worm wiggled up his nostril. And then we get a sort of The Fly narrative, but with worms.

Adam Where Lucas, like with Seth Brundle, is enjoying the transformation at first and becoming stronger.

Ren He stops feeling physical pain and he starts eating trash.

Adam Yeah, I quite like that. He finds some really mouldering salad in a bin and it's like, oh yeah.

Ren Yeah and it’s been established that he does stupid stunts but now he's worm powered he goes up on the roof and with his motorcycle and like jumps down onto Margot’s dad’s car. And he breaks his shoulder but it’s fine because the worms just kind of reanimate it.

Adam Yeah, and the special effect for that is quite gnarly, you see the worms writhing under his skin like veins. That’s pretty good.

And then they fight a big worm monster like it’s a Resident Evil game.

Ren And he also has to face up to his Dad’s suicide? Umm.

Adam Yeah, it is tonally quite odd, because in some ways it’s the most stupid gonzo episode, it has a worm monster, but also it’s dealing pretty full-on with the emotional consequences of suicide. It’s not as bad as that sounds though, to be fair, it does kind of work.

Ren It does kind of work! So yeah, Nora and Margot, Nora’s his mum, they go up to the top of this cliff where Lucas is saying he’s going to do this stunt that his Dad died trying to do, because he’s like “I’m powered by worms, I can do anything!”

Adam (laughs)

Ren And his Mum’s like, “Your dad did this jump because he knew he couldn’t make it”, like, damn.

Adam I just really enjoyed hearing you say: “I’m powered by worms, I can do anything!”

Shout it to Maki, just inexplicably.

Ren He vomits out the worms and they turn into a big worm, and they all get chased by Big Worm.

Adam Big Worm, is that like Big Pharma?

Ren Yeah, exactly.

Adam It’s a pretty unique episode of TV, so I kind of liked it for that.

Ren Also in this episode Lucas finds a fake eyeball in his shed, so the Slappy ominous foreshadowing continues.

Adam The legendary status of Slappy is further cemented. To be fair, I went to see a Goosebumps interactive theatre musical things about eight years back, in London, back when immersive theatre was briefly a big thing, so they had a show and the finale of that was a giant Slappy puppet and it was genuinely quite scary to be fair. You were in a big warehouse-style room and this giant puppet came towards you as an audience, and you had to run. And it was quite scary, so maybe Slappy is quite scary to be fair. And the music was all done by Tiger Lillies, so there is a Tiger Lillies Goosebumps album!

So if anyone wants to hear Goosebumps performed on the accordion sung by a guy with a falsetto singing voice, then that exists!

(Clip of the Tiger Lillies Goosebumps album: “Slappy, slappy, slappy, slappy, slappy.”)

Ren Maki’s got into the accordion recently.

Adam Well there you go, maybe she can cover the Goosebumps songs.

Ren I’ll have to tell her. We were just outside this morning, she was playing a song on accordion for the bees.

Adam Like a bee-summoning ritual?

Ren There were plenty of bees anywhere because there’s a lavender plant, but encouraging them I guess.

Adam Yeah, yeah. You know, my Year 10 students would not believe me that bees dance, the other day! We were doing An Inspector Calls, it’s a silly thing to be annoyed about, but there’s a line in that where Mr Birling, who’s meant to be a pompous, ignorant business man is mocking socialsim and he’s like “We’re all bees, in a hive, community and all that nonsense!” and I was trying to explain that the point is that he’s meant to be dismissing workers through the analogy of bees as being this chaotic mess of mindless activity and the irony is that bees are super organised and clever, and very powerful. And they were like: “What, bees?!” and I was like, “Yes, they dance,” and they were like, “Bees dancing?! They’re just crawling about!” and I was like: “No, they’re not, they’re communicating, it's what they do!” and they were not having it. I think they thought I was having them on, like it was some ridiculous joke I was making. The more I tried to convince them the less they were having it, basically. But obviously they do, they dance. Not like those stupid worms!

Ren Yeah, worms don’t dance!

Adam The message of the original seems to be: “Don’t be mean to worms.” because the main character is doing this horrid science experiment where he’s cutting up worms, and he’s like: “They don’t feel anything, they’re just worms” and that’s why the worms take revenge on him. And then at the end of the episode he goes fishing and says the same thing about fish, like he hasn’t learned a thing, and then he gets kidnapped by fish or something.

Ren Yeah, sure.

Adam Anyway, the last episode we’re talking about isn’t as far as I can tell, actually based on any original Goosebumps episode.

Ren They needed to do some more plot before we get onto Night of the Living Dummy.

Adam So it’s a bridging episode.

Ren Yeah, so that’s what’s happening in the fifth one, which is called Reader Beware. At the end of Go Eat Worms Nora, Lucas’s mom told the police that there was a giant worm and she’d seen a ghost so she ends up in the psychiatric ward under the care of one of the other Moms, Isabella’s mom.

Nora’s been established as a bit woo, and she has more of a sense of things being creepy, she has more of an intuitive sense of what’s going on than the other parents, she feels like things are going wrong again. But now she’s in the psychiatric ward because she’s been telling people about giant worms. So Mr Brat/Harold Biddle gives Margot Harold’s old sketchbook, and when she looks at pages from it that are related to different places she sees visions of 1993 and her mom’s interactions with young Harold and realises that at one point, they were friends.

And through these visions the teens realise that their parents were somehow involved in Harold Biddle’s death, they were in the house on the night.

Adam (geriatric millennial voice) And we get some of them Smashing Pumpkins in one of those flashbacks!

Ren They give us some little treats.

Adam Some little millennial treats: “Here you go, here’s some ‘90s nostalgia!”

Ren And that’s really setting us up for episode six, Night of the Living Dummy.

Adam I’m looking forward to discussing the much-anticipated Slappy.

Ren Much trailered.

Adam So overall it’s decent, right, it’s pretty good.

Ren It’s better than I expected!

Adam It’s classier than I expected. I don’t know who the target audience is, I don’t know if any actual teenagers are watching this, I feel like they’re possibly too busy watching jump scare videos on YouTube, or possibly actual horror films. One of my Year 7s was talking about favourite stories, and she said her favourite was the Black Phone. Which is very good, but I thought was a bit much for a Year 7.

Ren Ah, what’s that?

Adam It’s by Joe Hill, son of Stephen King. So it’s a proper horror story and there was a film made a few years ago. It’s very good, actually. It almost could count as children’s horror, but it has some properly nasty bits in it. It does have a child murderer in it, so it’s thematically very dark if not too explicit, so it’s probably not too concerning having a kid watch it, I guess.

But I looked it up, and apparently it did very well, and there’s going to be a second series, so people are watching it.

Ren And James is played by a YouTuber so maybe that will get the kids to watch it.

Adam Oh, I should have guessed. Now that you say it, he does have Youtuber energy.

Ren So, yes. I’m yawning!

Adam You’re sleepy!

Ren I’m sleepy, that’s who I am.

Adam Alright, let’s do the credits and then people can join us again in a few weeks, hopefully.

Ren If you enjoy the podcast then leave us a review on one of the places where you do that, we appreciate it!

Adam I’m looking forward to your collage for this one, actually.

RenDo you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

AdamYes, go make vegan veal, creepy kids!

Ren Yes, you have a mission. Bye!

Adam Bye!

(Outro music plays)