Goosebumps: The Vanishing is fun gateway horror

Gateway horror is important, but it’s going through a rough time. While the ’80s and ’90s saw a golden age of kid-friendly scares in book form (Goosebumps), TV (Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, Courage The Cowardly Dog), and films (Return To Oz, The Witches, The Secret Of NIMH), there are fewer and fewer of these horror projects coming out with each new year. Thankfully, one of the big players from the ’90s has kept the spirit of the spooky season alive, with Rob Letterman helming not just a successful Goosebumps movie in 2015 but also a reboot TV show that premiered in 2023. In its first season, the series was a fun horror-comedy that pulled from R.L. Stine’s work while telling a serialized story, with each episode referencing a different book as it built up an overarching tale. This time around, developers Letterman and Nicholas Stoller have cooked up gateway horror that’s a good time whether you’ve never heard of Goosebumps or have consumed every adaptation and can recall each book’s cover from memory.

Goosebumps: The Vanishing trades its setting, cast, and source material, but the format remains the same. Much like in the first season, The Vanishing starts 30 years in the past, when a poor teen suffered a tragedy, one that returns in the present to haunt a new set of kids. Specifically, in 1994, a group of teens vanished without a trace after going on a dare to last a night at a haunted fort. In 2024, twins Devin (Sam McCarthy) and Cece (Jayden Bartels) are spending the summer with their safety-obsessive and botany-enthusiast dad Anthony (David Schwimmer), whose older brother was one of the unfortunate kids from three decades earlier. Together with other neighborhood teens—Jen (Ana Ortiz), Alex (Francesca Noel), CJ (Elijah M. Cooper), Frankie (Galilea La Salvia), and Trey (Stony Blyden)—the twins quickly realize that their boring Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend is stranger and more full of monsters than they ever could have imagined. 

As an adaptation of classic Goosebumps stories, the new season does a commendable job of translating and updating the original frights. Though clearly restrained by a TV budget, the creature effects look solid, with a few well-placed jump scares and a healthy balance of spooks and laughs helping even the more outlandish monsters (we’re looking at you, Blob) seem menacing. Each episode mostly focuses on one of the main kids as they get trapped in a scary situation while building up a season-long mystery about the disappearance of the teens in the ’90s. When it comes to the younger characters, they are more archetypes and simple vessels through which to tell haunted stories, with most of the emotional baggage they bring getting abandoned almost as quickly as the credits roll on their particular episode.  

The clear standout of The Vanishing, thogh, is David Schwimmer’s Anthony. Much like the first season of Goosebumps, these new episodes intertwine the stories of the teens and their parents, with Anthony’s tale here quickly becoming the most interesting of the bunch. This mostly comes down to Schwimmer’s fantastic performance, which tackles both a hefty amount of trauma as Anthony reels from the death of his brother and obsesses over safety and control—particularly as he starts to realize that whatever happened in 1994 is happening again—as well as silly and spooky modes. No, he does not recreate season one’s dance sequence to “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers, but he does freak out at every adult in the show by talking very loudly about plants and bulbs. 

Surprisingly for a Disney+ series, every episode of Goosebumps: The Vanishing is more than 40 minutes long. And yet, each one runs out of steam around that same 35-minute mark, right before the last gasp. It is unfortunate, because the writers manage to maintain the tension in each installment, adeptly balancing the adaptations of Stine’s books while still telling a serialized story. But time and time again, the final stretch quickly deflates a good cliffhanger by introducing a less impactful one in its last moments. 

That reservation aside, Goosebumps: The Vanishing is indeed an enjoyable gateway-horror followup to last year’s batch, with a compelling season-long arc that’s an engaging adaptation of Welcome To Camp Nightmare. Even after more than 30 years, there is apparently still plenty of gas left in Goosebumps‘ tank.  

Goosebumps: The Vanishing premieres January 10 on Disney+ and Hulu