Goosebumps
Goosebumps | Buzz shivers at the first big-screen adaptation of R.L. Stine’s chilling children’s books.
Hooking up with Jack Black on set for some PG scares.
“We have an eerie similarity about us, don’t we?” Jack Black, clad entirely in his namesake colour, has noticed Buzz’s unease upon seeing a ventriloquist puppet in the suburban Georgia middle school that serves as the set of director Rob Letterman’s big-screen adap of R.L. Stine’s bestselling pre-teen horror books, Goosebumps.
The film is filled with the author’s creepiest creations, including evil lawn gnomes, giant mantises, and a clown named Murder. But the most sinister is Slappy, the dummy who orchestrates much of the film’s mayhem when Stine’s imagination is inadvertently let loose on a small Delaware town.
It’s a sweltering mid-June afternoon, but the humidity is absent in the air-conditioned, dimly lit corridor in which one of the film’s climactic scenes takes place. Black, playing Stine himself, is back in character, barking commands to his young daughter Hannah (Odeya Rush) and her love interest Zach (Dylan Minnette), as he tries to save the school from a supernatural onslaught. “Slappy’s coming after me,” shouts Black. “I have a deadline. Literally!”
“Slappy’s kind of amazing,” Letterman tells Buzz in the school’s nearby library. “A lot of effort and multiple teams of artists went into that little dummy… Slappy is Stine’s id. If you put it up next to Jack you see a resemblance, but on its own you don’t key into it. At the end of the movie there’s gonna be a split mirror and you’ll see their faces line up and you’ll realise it.”
Letterman, who also worked with Black on Shark Tale and Gulliver’s Travels, says he sees Goosebumps, originally developed by Tim Burton back in 1998, as an opportunity to do a film like those he grew up on in the ’80s.
“I really loved movies like Goonies and E.T. and Back To The Future. They all had a tone and
a vibe that I really appreciated, all the way up to Jurassic Park… This whole world, even though there’s supernatural monsters entering it, it’s a very grounded town and grounded characters with real stakes and emotions. I loved that in those old movies, and I’m trying to do the same type of thing.”
Indeed Letterman is shooting his film with the same anamorphic Panavision C lenses with which his favourites were filmed, and he’s employed a stack of practical and CG creations, courtesy of London’s Moving Picture Company.
“There’s been a lot of running,” laughs the 18-year-old Minnette. “We got to run from some ghouls in the cemetery, got to run from clowns and creeps. I pushed Jack around in a shopping cart really fast in a supermarket running from the Werewolf of Fever Swamp. I was sliding around on the ice for three days in an ice rink with the Abominable Snowman… There’s tons of creatures in this movie.”
The Israeli-born Rush adds that, like the twist-ending books on which Goosebumps is based, “There’s not a bland moment. Every scene is so complex. We always discover a new detail, a new clue to building the story.”
With all of those monsters at his disposal, Letterman admits that one of his biggest tasks has been generating scares for young people. “I wanted it to be completely real and photoreal, but at the same time I couldn’t go over the top and be too frightening. All the monsters – and there’s hundreds of them – had to feel like they came from the same universe. I fell back on very realistic creatures, but then I added certain accessories to each of them.”
As for which… “I put the werewolf in LeBron James Nike pants with Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers that he’s bursting out of,” says the filmmaker. “And we have a French vampire poodle that has a little pink bow and a pink collar that looks very cute.” JMc
ETA | 5 February 2016 Goosebumps opens next year.
‘I loved movies like Goonies and Back To The Future... I’m trying to do the same type of thing’ Rob Lett erman