Growing up as the youngest of four, I inherited a ton of hand-me-downs from my older siblings, including a spooky gene that really embraced horror movies and Halloween. Consequently, it’s no surprise that I gravitated to the creepy, shimmering R. L. Stine paperbacks that would occasionally pop-up on the shelves in my room. I’d stay up on school nights way later than the average 4th grader should have, using the light from my Nintendo DS to illuminate the pages of THE HAUNTED MASK or WELCOME TO DEAD HOUSE, and then continue my quest to find more of Stine’s works in the school library the next day. It was through this endeavor that I found the ultimate combination of my love of video games, horror, and books: The GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS series.
My current love of choice-based narrative horror games is no surprise when I look back on how much I obsessed over the GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS books, which are non-linear, interactive, and personalized experiences with multiple endings—a very similar paradigm to common video games. If you found one of my childhood copies of ESCAPE FROM THE CARNIVAL OF HORRORS or SCREAM OF THE EVIL GENIE, you’d notice that almost half of the pages within the books are bent in the corners or have markings in some way as I tried to navigate each of the choices within them to find the best endings. Years later, I devour games like Until Dawn or Telltale’s The Walking Dead in the same way. With the current fixation on the works of R.L. Stine with the FEAR STREET trilogy and the upcoming Just Beyond series on Disney+, it has me thinking: Wouldn’t it be amazing to have some choice-based narrative horror games based on the CHOOSE YOUR OWN SCARES series?
There are 50 books in the series, spanning an impressive array of settings, cryptids and creatures. You may find yourself at a camp pitted against a cult of zombies and alien creatures in the same book, and each book boasts 20+ endings. Some storylines have you primarily focused on escaping dangerous situations, while others task you with fighting back against the monsters trying to eat you. A video game adaptation of any book in the series would have a robust source of material to work with.
I re-read a couple of the GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS books before writing this article to see how they’ve held up, and make sure that it wasn’t my nostalgia lenses convincing me that this was a good idea. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t—in fact, it only further piqued my interest because I forgot just how freaking dark the books get at times. A bad ending in ESCAPE CAMP RUN-FOR-YOUR-LIFE had my body slowly deteriorate, in detail, after being attacked by a skeleton, with my “skin crumbling and peeling off” as my organs, “shriveled and fell out.” Another ending in RETURN TO THE CARNIVAL OF HORRORS had me and my group fall prey to acidic slugs whose slime felt like “landing in a red-hot frying pan” as they slithered onto all of us, melting our skin off as our cries echoed into the void. GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS has the versatility of appealing to juvenile audiences while also having material that could still appeal to the horror fans who grew up with Stine.
The open-endedness of the characters and the ability for any reader to project themselves as the protagonist in each book would also make it much easier to modernize each story. When discussing the process of adapting the FEAR STREET series into a film trilogy, director Leigh Janiak mentioned to Rue Morgue, “We were given free rein. We were very much supported by the producers, by the studio, by the R.L. Stine estate, to look at the material and decide what made sense.” FEAR STREET tackled themes of generational trauma and homophobia while remaining true to the spirit of the book series, indicating that a video-game adaptation would likely be granted the same ability to explore stories and themes relevant to current audiences.
With the advancements in VR and experimentations in blurring the lines between video games and film, there are countless innovative ways that adaptations could be created, and audiences are hungry for them. A CHOOSE YOUR OWN SCARES adaptation could take on an entire anthology series, similar to The Dark Pictures Anthology, or even take the route that Black Mirror: Bandersnatch did and lean heavily in on being a cinematic experience with a branching narrative.
In any case, the resurging interest in adapting the works of R.L. Stine is an exciting phenomenon for new and veteran fans alike. Perhaps the reception to upcoming projects in development will dictate whether we see a deeper exploration if his works in unique ways, but the signs seem to be pointing towards the fact that exploring the CHOOSE YOUR OWN SCARES series would be a natural next step. I know I’d personally love to re-explore the Carnival Of Horrors on a big screen with a controller in hand—in the meantime, I might try to dig up more of my favorite books from the series and try my luck at getting a good ending again.