Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Goosebumps: The Vanishing
WhileGoosebumps: The Vanishingtells an original story, the show’s plot references numerous books from RL Stine’s ‘90s series. RL Stine’sGoosebumpsnovels were a massive hit for Parachute Press and Scholastic in the ‘90s. Fast-paced, short children’s horror novels with a sense of humor, theGoosebumpsbooks were a pop culture phenomenon. Stine’s novels sold millions of copies and inspired a television adaptation that brought a new book to life in each episode. The franchise later spawned 2015’s live-action comedy horror movieGoosebumpsand its 2018 sequel,Goosebumps: Haunted Halloween, as well as2023’sGoosebumpsTV show.
Goosebumps Season 2: Everything You Need To Know
The 2023 reboot proved to be a hit with fans of R.L. Stine’s books, and Goosebumps season 2 on Disney+ and Hulu continues that trend.
2023’sGoosebumpsused Stine’s novels as a jumping-off point, taking inspiration from various famous books for its story.Goosebumpsseason 1’s cliffhangerending was left unresolved when the show’s creators opted to focus the next season on a new, unrelated story.Goosebumps: The Vanishing’s cast of charactersinclude the botanist Anthony Brewer and his teens Cece and Devin, who are stuck spending the summer in Gravesend with him. Cece and Devin soon befriend local teens Alex, Trey, CJ, and Frankie, and end up stumbling across a mystery related to the disappearance of Anthony’s brother 30 years earlier.
7Stay Out of The Basement
Goosebumps: The Vanishing’s First Two Episodes Adapted This Classic Title
The first two episodes ofGoosebumps: The Vanishingare entitledStay Out of The Basement Parts 1& 2, and it is easy to see why season 2 of the series picked this famous novel to adapt.Goosebumps: The VanishingborrowsStay Out of The Basement’s storyline as the season’s main plot, although the show changes a lot of details along the way. Like the protagonists of that book, Margaret and Casey, Cece, and Devin have a secretive plant scientist for a father. Anthony is a botanist who is working on mysterious experiments involving plants in his basement laboratory.
Anthony is hiding a secret down in the basement like the father from Stine’s novel Stay Out of The Basement.
However, Anthony has a much more sympathetic backstory. AsGoosebumps: The Vanishing’s endingreveals, Anthony always blamed himself for his older brother Matty’s disappearance decades earlier. Anthony has spent the intervening 30 years searching for a way to prove that his brother didn’t simply drown and get lost at sea, which was the official story told after his disappearance. As such, Anthony is hiding a secret down in the basement like the father from Stine’s novelStay Out of The Basement. However, his secret is sadder and less nefarious, although it still results in some wild and surprisingly violent misadventures.
6Camp Nightmare
This Iconic Killer Summer Camp Novel Becomes A Vital Location
Camp Nightmarehas one of the most inspired twists in any of the originalGoosebumpsbooks, and it is one that remains a campy delight to this day. However,Goosebumps: The Vanishingchanges the context of the phrase “Camp Nightmare” completely, using the name to refer to an all-new location. InGoosebumps: The Vanishing, “Camp Nightmare” is what the local teens from Gravesend dub the site where Anthony’s brother and three other teens went missing decades earlier. Although many characters refer to “Camp Nightmare” throughout the series, there is only one point whenGoosebumps: The Vanishingdepicts the camp as a summer camp.
Early in the penultimate episode ofGoosebumps: The Vanishing, a smarmy counselor leads a troupe of boy scouts around an abandoned former military fort on a tour. His mean-spirited comments soon get their just reward when he is grabbed by a cloud of sentient alien spores and dragged into the sea under the fort. Like many ofGoosebumpsseason 1’s Stine references, this cute nod is a clever touch for fans of the original novels but not a major part of the story. The location isn’t even technically a summer camp, although the fort does prove itself nightmarish.
5The Haunted Car
Trey’s Return As A Possessed Car Borrowed This Book’s Premise
The initial human villain ofGoosebumps: The Vanishing, Stony Blyden’s Trey, is dispatched surprisingly quickly. He is attacked by a carnivorous alien plant in Anthony’s freezer after he breaks into the basement and attempts to destroy the botanist’s work with a baseball bat, and he returns as an inhuman monster. When Frankie crushes the monstrous Trey with his own car,Trey fuses with his car, and the car itself becomes powered by his vengeful spirit. The car, which is soon “Borrowed” by Alex, acts a lot like the haunted car from Stine’sGoosebumpsbookThe Haunted Car.
Trey’s car isn’t technically haunted by a ghost.
However, the two stories do diverge in some pivotal places. For one thing, Trey’s car isn’t technically haunted by a ghost. Although he seemingly died when he was crushed by the car or possibly even earlier when he was first attacked by the plant, Trey isn’t dead when he possesses his car. He emerges from an alien pod alive and well in the next episode and, although he does cough up an alien slug at the end ofGoosebumps: The Vanishing, he is one of the only characters who encounters the aliens and lives to tell the tale.
4Monster Blood
The Kombucha Subplot Borrows From Monster Blood
Goosebumps: The Vanishingepisode 4, “Monster Blood,” focuses on Cece’s attempts to cover up her failure to get into a prestigious debate program. However, the episode also lives up to its title with a plot that borrows from not one, but two Stine novels.Cece accidentally ingests some of the alien spores possessing Trey when she is in the car with Alex, and she ends up violently vomiting up these spores in her mother’s apartment after blacking out. The spores then expand and grow into a monstrous blob that rampages through the apartment, trying to trap and kill Cece.
While the story ofGoosebumps: The Vanishingwas already relatively over-the-top, the events of “Monster Blood” truly take the cake. Cece is saved by Devin and Frankie, only for the monstrous alien slime blob to consume an entire subway train just to get to her. Cece successfully defeats the blob when she electrocutes it with the subway rails, and she later realizes that it was drinking her trusty kombucha that resulted in the alien spores infecting her. Her kombucha cup was sitting in Trey’s car while he possessed the car, and some of the alien spores got inside.
3The Blob That Ate Everyone
Cece’s Ordeal Referenced This Stine Story
While Cece’s episode might be titled “Monster Blood,” the outing also clearly owes a debt to Stine’sGoosebumpsnovelThe Blob That Ate Everyone. The blob seen in “Monster Blood” resembles the monsters from both books, andThe Blob That Ate Everyone’s plot reflects Cece’s personal journey more than the story ofMonster Blood. The tale of a young writer who is cursed with a magical typewriter that makes his horror story about a man-eating blob come true,The Blob That Ate Everyoneeventually sees its hero give up on his attempts at literary greatness to save everyone.
“Monster Blood” proved that the anthology show can effectively remix the fun, goofy plots of Stine novels like The Blob That Ate Everyone.
Similarly, Cece eventually has to give up on her own fiction to save herself and her friends. Claiming that she was enrolled in the summer debating program resulted in her ending up isolated when the blob monster attacked, and she needed to come clean to Devin and Frankie before she could stop the monster from killing her and them. WhileGoosebumpsseason 1’s storywas darker thanGoosebumps: The Vanishingin places, “Monster Blood” proved that the anthology show can effectively remix the fun, goofy plots of Stine novels likeThe Blob That Ate Everyone.
2The Ghost Next Door
Goosebumps Fans Will Recognize Hannah’s Name
In “The Ghost Next Door,” Devin suddenly comes across a friendly, if somewhat uncanny, girl named Hannah in the park. Since he and Frankie have just endured a lover’s quarrel, he is quick to warm to her. However, viewers familiar with theGoosebumpsnovels will already know where this story is going thanks to Hannah’s name. The tenth book in the originalGoosebumpsseries,The Ghost Next Door, follows a young protagonist named Hannah who becomes increasingly convinced that her neighbor is a ghost. In a genuinely surprising twist, viewers eventually learn that this is not the case.
It is actually Hannah herself who is the ghost, and she doesn’t realize it until the novel’s ending. Like thelive-actionGoosebumpsmovies,Goosebumps: The Vanishingreuses this twist. Unfortunately, the revelation isn’t as effective here as it was in the original novel and the 2015 movie. For one thing, Hannah never seems like an ordinary person and the show’s music makes it clear that she is an eerie, villainous character. For another,Hannah’s status as a ghost isn’t a surprise inGoosebumps: The Vanishingthanks toThe Ghost Next Door. Stine’s novel is famous enough to remain well-remembered decades later.
1The Werewolf Of Fever Swamp
Anthony’s Relationship With Devin And Cece Mirrors This Novel’s Plot
AlthoughGoosebumps: The Vanishing doesn’t feature a werewolf, its setup does borrow from Stine’sGoosebumpsbookThe Werewolf Of Fever Swamp. That novel sees an animal biologist relocate with his grumbling kids and refuse to believe them when his son and daughter think they have unearthed a real-life werewolf. Much the same fate befalls Devin and Cece, whose botanist father fails to heed their warnings when the twins tell him something weird is going on in Gravesend. Luckily,Goosebumps: The Vanishing’s ending sees Devin and Cece save Anthony and Anthony later returns the favor, unlikeThe Werewolf Of Fever Swamp’s darker twist ending.
