Goose­bumps

No one knows why a Goose­bumps movie is being made in 2016. It’s a giant enig­ma, a nos­tal­gic pol­ter­geist. It’s your child­hood cat that got run over, buried in your back­yard and end­ed up crawl­ing through your bed­room win­dow at night like a feline Revenant. Watch­ing a Goose­bumps movie in 2016 should be such a weird, sad expe­ri­ence. And yet, it isn’t.

Goose­bumps is a film blind­ly unaware of its own irrel­e­vance. It doesn’t care that you haven’t read an RL Stine nov­el in 15 years, that you reg­u­lar­ly con­fuse it with Are You Afraid of the Dark?, or that pass­ing down this pop cul­ture morsel to the lit­tle ones in your life hasn’t exact­ly been a top pri­or­i­ty. Goose­bumps is a drunk aunt twirling at a wed­ding recep­tion: the most infec­tious­ly glee­ful lack of self-aware­ness there is.

Such igno­rance of the pass­ing of time enables this film to infuse the rev­e­la­tion that Jack Black’s reclu­sive, cur­mud­geon­ly writer is, in fact, RL Stine with the kind of gid­dy awe you might reserve for the dis­cov­ery that Helen Mir­ren is liv­ing in your base­ment. In the end, unbound awe seems the more prof­itable path to take over cyn­i­cism. Post-mod­ern com­men­taries on con­sumerism and the media can be deli­cious in the right hands, tax­ing in oth­ers; so there’s some­thing refresh­ing about a film which doesn’t attempt to com­mu­ni­cate some vital mes­sage about what Goose­bumps means today or where it sits with­in the wider cul­tur­al landscape.

Instead, the film’s nar­ra­tive charms lie in the famil­iar­i­ty of its world. Goose­bumps’ wants to remind you how ter­ri­fied you were by Slap­py the Liv­ing Dum­my, and so Slap­py takes cen­tre stage as the film’s socio­path­ic antag­o­nist. Sure, there are a few buzz­words – ​‘twerk­ing’, ​‘Twit­ter’, etc – sprin­kled in to reas­sure view­ers that this is in fact a mod­ern pro­duc­tion and not the result of some­one uncov­er­ing a dusty old film can­is­ter in the cor­ner of the Scholas­tic offices.

The rest is pure ​’90s – all deceased fathers, awk­ward teen infat­u­a­tions and loud-mouthed nerds; silli­ness for the kids with a few clever jokes slipped under the radar for the adults (includ­ing, remark­ably, a pae­dophil­ia gag). When our hero Zach (Dylan Min­nette) unwit­ting­ly unleash­es Stine’s cre­ations, their escapades instant­ly evoke the fam­i­ly films of Steven Spiel­berg and Joe Dante. In this sense, Goose­bumps reveals itself to be a film that knows exact­ly how to deliv­er sim­ple pleasures.