R.L. Stine, of course, is the veteran novelist behind the wildly popular and long-running Goosebumps books. His works, mostly scary stories for 7- to 12-year-olds, set many a kid on the path to appreciating good horror. And they've inspired two television series: Goosebumps and The Nightmare Room. It's been a long while since Stine penned a
Goosebumps novel, but more are finally on the way. His current series of books,
Rotten School, is doing well. And on Sept. 4, Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release the made-for-DVD movie
The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It, which stars Emily Osment, Cody Linley, Brittany Curran and
Saw's Tobin Bell.
SCI FI Weekly recently caught up with Stine at his Long Island home for a conversation about his career, the new DVD and his upcoming return to the world of Goosebumps.
How easy or hard was it to convince you to let someone adapt The Haunting Hour into a movie and possibly a DVD franchise?Stine: Mainly, it was same guys who did the
Goosebumps TV show, and we've stayed in touch with them. They did such a good job on the TV show, and we did four or five seasons of that show. It was the number-one show three years in a row on Fox Kids. So they came to us with the idea and they said, "We think we can get Universal to do it, and we'd like to do it." We trust them and know they do good work, and that's how it happened.
It's such a visual story that it completely lends itself to the screen.Stine: It is so visual. It has a great monster, really an amazing monster. The effects in this film just came out terrific. You can do a very good description of a monster, but seeing it is a very different thing.
If someone has never read The Haunting Hour books, how would you set up the premise of Don't Think About It?Stine: Well, basically, in a sentence or two, it's about a brother and sister who don't really get along very well, who find a book which allows them to summon a disgusting creature if they think about it. And the book advises them, "Don't think about it and the monster won't come to life." Of course, once someone tells you, "Don't think about it," what do you do? You think about it. And that's basically what it is. They think about it and bring this creature to life, and then they have to do something to get rid of it.
How much of a hand, if any, did you have in the production?Stine: [Co-writer] Billy Brown and [co-writer/co-producer] Dan Angel had ideas for a story they wanted to do, and it fit in with
The Haunting Hour. It's very much like the stories I did in my two short-story books,
The Nightmare Hour and
The Haunting Hour. I thought it was very similar. The three of us talked, and I had some ideas for it, and they added that. I had some input on final script. We talked about that, too, and I had some suggestions. That was basically my role.
How happy are you with the finished product?Stine: I think it's great. I'm very pleased. I hope we do a whole bunch of them. They're talking about doing a second one now, based on a story in
The Haunting Hour book that I wrote, called
Bad Babysitter. Maybe I'm not supposed to talk about that, I don't know. But I hope we do it. We had a really good cast for this, people that kids will recognize, which is always really good.
Switching gears, what's the pleasure you take in writing for a younger audience, and in scaring a younger audience?Stine: I love to scare kids. That's my big thrill in life, terrifying kids. No, I'm being sarcastic. I've always written for kids. They're a wonderful audience. I found this out right when I started writing for them. Especially my audience, which is 7 to 12, these are the last years where they will ever be enthusiastic about books or enthusiastic about an author. I guess that after 11 or 12 they have to be cool. They can't be enthusiastic. But this audience, they love you, they buy everything you write, they want to collect everything, and they send you unbelievable amounts of mail. When the kids get older they don't have time to write to an author. So it's just the most wonderful audience. I didn't start out scary. I started out writing funny books for kids, joke books and humor books. Then I wrote my first scary novel for teenagers,
Blind Date, and it was an immediate best-seller. And I thought, "Wait a minute. I've struck a chord here. I've found something kids really like." In the beginning I didn't really understand it. I'd go to schools, I'd talk to kids and I'd ask, "Why do you like these scary books?" And every single time they said, "We like to be scared." That was their answer.
As you have gotten older and matured, how much harder has it become to write for that younger audience?Stine: Now it is harder. It was easier. For a while I was writing a
Goosebumps book every month and a
Fear Street book every month. I was writing a book every two weeks. Once that got going, and the success of
Goosebumps and
Fear Street was so amazing, it was so exhilarating, and it really kept me going. It was just a great time. But now I've written 87
Goosebumps books. I've pretty much done everything you can do, right? And I've written 100
Fear Street books, so I've killed off teenagers any way you can kill teenagers. So the challenge for me now is to find new things, new stories, and new ways of telling stories. All my chapter endings are cliffhangers. So I'm trying not to repeat myself and am trying to find new cliffhangers and new scares. And that's more challenging.
