R.L. Stine’s stories come to life in first Goosebumps movie trailer

R.L. Stine (Jack Black) fights the monsters from his imagination

Back in early to mid 90s, Scholastic Publishing published a series of children's horror fiction novels, called Goosebumps, from American author R.L. Stine. The franchise was a hit, spawning a television series, various merchandise, and now a movie.

Whereas episodes in the television series focused on the retelling of individual stories from the Goosebumps books, the new movie from Sony Pictures Entertainment — simply called Goosebumps — looks to focus more on the life of author R.L. Stine. Well, in a sort of goofy, fictional way. Judging by the trailer, the Goosebumps movie is a more fictionalized version of his life, with a focus on one specific event in which the monsters from his books are real and accidentally unleashed. 

Check out the trailer above and the official description below.

"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."

Goosebumps hits theaters October 16, just in time for Halloween. Judging by the light, comedic tone of the trailer, it looks like it'll be one of the more family-friendly Halloween-themed movies this year.