Disney has canceled their streaming series Goosebumps, a serialized take on the iconic anthology horror series from author R.L. Stine. I remember watching the first episode of the show and thinking, “This looks fine enough for kids today but doesn’t spark any excitement from me, someone who was raised on those books.”
Which led me to contemplate a subject that’s often on my mind: anthology horror. It’s my favorite storytelling in all of fiction and I’ve even written about it during another lifetime. When I heard about Goosebumps being canceled, it made me take another look at pop culture and ask, “Where have all the campfire story TV shows gone?”
Raised on Scary Tales
If you were growing up in the 1980s and well into the 1990s, anthology horror was practically inescapable. Thanks to George Romero’s EC Comics tribute Creepshow hitting the #1 spot at the box office in 1982, the format became a hot commodity in Hollywood. We’d see a revival of the most recognizable anthology TV show, The Twilight Zone, in 1985 that would last for three seasons over four years. More importantly, Creepshow would lead to a legitimate EC Comics adaptation on television in 1989 with Tales from the Crypt, an anthology series hosted by your pal and mine, the Crypt Keeper.
Tales from the Crypt would end up a surprise smash hit with audiences on HBO, managing to hold on for seven seasons all the way into 1996. Not to mention it also got two theatrical feature films released before the run was through. Needless to say, audiences (especially those too young at the time like yours truly) and pop culture were fully engaged with anthology horror for well over a decade.
And since Tales from the Crypt wasn’t a show meant for kids, the machine of capitalism knew it needed to strike while this iron was hot and get some projects up and running that could target this trend and aim it directly at kids.
You’re In for a Scare, Kids
The biggest and most relevant of these endeavors for me was Nickelodeon’s 1992 series Are You Afraid of the Dark?, where the wraparound premise for the stories was a group of kids called The Midnight Society who met to tell each other scary stories around a crackling fire. Seeing this kind of camaraderie between a diverse group of young kids was an important part of my upbringing. I understood that divisions in real life –– the kids of the Midnight Society were from different schools and didn’t socialize with each other during the day –– were something fiction and storytelling could overcome by bringing people together for a good scary tale.
Naturally, R.L. Stine got on the anthology horror bandwagon with the Goosebumps series of books in 1992, and thanks to the zeitgeist of anthology horror, they became a runaway success. The books would get adapted into a series starting 1995 with certain episodes like the pilot, “The Haunted Mask”, becoming staples for a generation.
Give Kids the Campfire Again
So, what does this have to do with Goosebumps getting canceled by Disney? Like I said at the beginning, this iteration of the property was a serialized take that integrated many noteworthy stories from the book series. That’s not a worthless endeavor by any means, but it does make me wonder why Goosebumps couldn’t exist as an anthology horror series today. Or really, why kids aren’t being given their own campfire horror shows today.
The anthology format has mostly fallen out of favor with modern viewers trained on making serialized shows seem more important. Even the most popular modern anthology show, Black Mirror, can’t help itself by crafting connections between certain episodes or straightforward serialized continuations.
But, Black Mirror isn’t a show for kids. Heck, it’s not even a show trying to illicitly grab the attention of younger viewers like Tales from the Crypt. The market for an anthology horror series does not seem to be supported because audiences across the age spectrum aren’t as enamored by something they feel is more fleeting than a serialized story.
That’s a shame because kids deserve and need anthology horror. They need the campfire they can huddle around that’s just for them, where they aren’t being talked down to or treated with kid gloves. Trust me, by the end of its original run in Season 5, Are You Afraid of the Dark? was pumping out monsters that would even scare some adults today (example above).
Anthology horror doesn’t just need to make a comeback in general, it needs to find a way to get kids excited about it again like they were when Goosebumps books were flying off the shelf and we all ran home to catch the next Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode.
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