Jack Black is getting in touch with his sinister side in the upcoming big screen take on R.L. Stine's spooky kids book series “Goosebumps,” and Sony has released some details about the film's creepy plot.
Black will be playing Stine himself, and is reuniting with his “Gulliver”s Travels” director Rob Letterman.
The studio announced the start of production earlier this week, and followed up with an official synopsis, which reveals more about the film's meta-narrative.
Read it here:
“In Goosebumps, upset about moving from a big city to a small town, teenager Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) finds a silver lining when he meets the beautiful girl, Hannah (Odeya Rush), living right next door. But every silver lining has a cloud, and Zach”s comes when he learns that Hannah has a mysterious dad who is revealed to be R. L. Stine (Jack Black), the author of the bestselling Goosebumps series. It turns out that there is a reason why Stine is so strange… he is a prisoner of his own imagination – the monsters that his books made famous are real, and Stine protects his readers by keeping them locked up in their books. When Zach unintentionally unleashes the monsters from their manuscripts and they begin to terrorize the town, it”s suddenly up to Stine, Zach, and Hannah to get all of them back in the books where they belong.”
The plot will allow the film to incorporate various elements from the long-running book series which featured scores of independent stories.
Stine published 62 books from 1992 to 1997, plus several spin-offs. The series spawned an anthology TV series which from 1995 to 1998. Hollywood has been trying to scare up a film version for years, with Tim Burton attached as a producer at one point in the '90s.
Amy Ryan, Jillian Bell, Ryan Lee and Ken Marino also star in the film version.
“Goosebumps” is scheduled to be released March 23, 2016.