Movies
Fresh Details Unearthed for the ‘Goosebumps’ Movie George A. Romero Wrote in the 1990s
It wasn’t until 2015 that the Goosebumps franchise exploded onto the big screen, but as you might imagine, Hollywood had been trying to figure out a way to bring R.L. Stine‘s iconic characters and stories to life for quite a long while prior to that. Tim Burton was at one point attached to direct an adaptation, and George A. Romero even took a crack at a script.
This week, the University of Pittsburgh Library System’s Horror Studies branch unearthed that script from the George Romero Archive, and they’ve shared some details over on their site.
As the team explains, Romero’s take on Goosebumps was to adapt the very first book in Stine’s series, titled Welcome to Dead House. Naturally, it was to be a zombie story…
“The Stine book is set in a town called Dark Falls whose inhabitants are, secretly, the living dead. When the Benson family moves in, young Josh and Amanda discover that a flashlight beam is sufficient to crumble the town’s residents into dust. Every year, the town must feed on the blood of a new family to sustain their undead existence.”
“Romero retains the basic scenario and all of the major character names but tweaks the story in revealing ways. In the Stine book, the zombification comes, a la Return of the Living Dead, because of a mysterious gas that escapes from a local factory. Romero makes the capitalistic origins more emphatic: the town patriarch, the wealthy Foster Devries, has in death possessed the town. The state of living death experienced by the residents stemmed from a supernatural power that Devries has now shared with/imposed on the town.”
The team goes on to explain that the house is Romero’s story is “undead, as it is possessed by Devries’ spirit. Devries/the house feeds off its inhabitants, sucking out their energy until they die, after which they are revived to join the rest of the undead in the town.”
The write-up further details, “Romero’s nightmarish scenario here involves not being killed and eaten but, rather, essentially having an awful, soul-killing job.”
Head over to the University of Pittsburgh Library System’s Horror Studies website to learn a whole lot more about Romero’s Goosebumps, which was laced with social commentary.
The George A. Romero Archival Collection was acquired by the University of Pittsburgh in 2019, and the team has been hard at work on preserving lost gems from Romero’s career.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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