Where’s the horror in the ‘Goosebumps’ trailer?

JACK Black plays author R. L. Stine in the Goosebumps movie, but does the film live up to our childhood nightmares?

TO THIS day, I still can’t look at the book cover for R.L. Stine’s “Night of the Living Dummy” without experiencing a small pang of fear.

Sure, if I read the books today, I bet I’d find them quite innocent — perhaps even funny. But when you’re five years old and your sadistic older brother is reading the books to you in your bunk bed with the lights off, they’re terrifying.

So I was excited to hear Sony is releasing a film inspired by the book series. As an avid fan of the horror genre, I was hoping the creatures that scared me in written form (as well as in the short-lived TV series) would be made bigger and badder on the silver screen.

No such luck. As the film’s trailer, released today, shows, Goosebumps is getting the Shaun of the Dead treatment.

The plot is almost intriguing. Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette), a teenage boy, moves to a small town next to his new neighbour Hannah (Odeya Rush) and her father, R.L. Stine (Jack Black). Zach accidentally unleashes the ghouls and monsters from his books on their town, and it’s up to Zach, Hannah and Stine to put them back where they came from.

The abominable snowman roaming the streets? Evil garden gnomes sneaking in through the basement window? Invisible spirits hiding in your car? It’s a horror-genre mashup of epic proportions.

But instead of making these beasts actually evil, they’re dimwitted creatures incapable of surviving outside of their books. Instead of attacking a roomful of teens with bloodthirsty rage, the abominable snowman gets distracted by ... a light bulb?

Even the evil garden ghouls from Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes can’t catch a break. Rather than stealthily sneaking around the house, cutting the throats of humans while they sleep, they’re demoted to Minion-like antics, jokingly tossing steak knives that (unfortunately) miss their targets.

I’m also not sure how this plot differs from Sony’s other big release this year, Pixels. In that film, video game characters come to life and are bent on destroying the world — until a gang of gamers defeats them. Is Sony that hard-pressed for movie ideas that they’re just stealing everything popular from our youth and bringing it all to the present with a vengeance?

Dear Hollywood, please give me the horror film that I — and so many of my fellow millennials — want: a Goosebumps movie filled with enough macabre to wipe away any remembrance of childhood innocence.

Goosebumps will be released in Australian cinemas on December 26

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.

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