Full confession, now… Goosebumps scarred the crap out of me when I was a kid. Yeah, I’ll fess up to it--it was right up there with Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Ernest Scared Stupid in my six-year-old self's terror department. Of course, I look back at it now and the titles are “spine-tinglers” like The Ghost Who Skipped Home Ec or something equally ridiculous, but back then… woo boy… R.L. Stine might as well have been Stephen King or Clive Barker whenever I saw one of these books stacked next to, say, Encyclopedia Brown at a Scholastic book fair.
So what conjured this possible case of T.M.I. from me? The short of it’s that Carl Ellsworth, the co-writer of Disturbia, is writing a feature version of the books for Columbia in some joint-op between Original Film and Scholastic. That's what THR is saying. As I recall, there weren’t any recurring characters in this series aside from some of the monsters (like this freaky ventriloquist dummy!) so I expect this will be some kind of kid-friendly Creepshow.
Sheesh… there’s another skeleton out of the closet of my formative years. Was anybody else really freaked out by how the Leslie Nielsen short ended? “Oh, I can hold my breath for a long, looooong time!”
