Telling Rob Letterman (Goosebumps 2015, Detective Pikachu) and Hilary Winston (My Name Is Earl, Community), the executive producers on Disney+’s Goosebumps: The Vanishing, that I’ve grown carnivorous plants for over 30 years wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card. But it’s exactly how our Zoom chat began a few weeks ago.
I told them how watching this second season was, in effect, like going to church. A strange, hungry, vine-choked church, sure. But church, nonetheless.
“I’m sure you had a few notes,” Hilary said, laughing.
“Yeah, I don’t know how technically accurate we were,” Rob admitted.
I went on to say that when David Schwimmer’s botanical character interacted with a sinister spore-birthed bulb for the first time in the initial Stay Out of the Basement episodes, I recognized how it was modeled after Rafflesia, the stinking corpse lily of Southeast Asia, a parasitic giant flower that feeds solely on other plants. Or in the case of Goosebumps: The Vanishing, Ross Geller from Friends.
“That’s probably what it is, by the way,” Rob said, chuckling. “I know we took it from a real-world flower.”
“We had all those meetings with Weta, who did the VFX, with all sorts of weird plants from all over the world,” Hilary added. “Really cool stuff I’d never seen before. Then we were like, oh, we actually have a job to do, after we looked at plants for two hours. We could have used your expertise!”
It seems I should have let Rob and Hilary know about my carnivorous plant obsession before they wrote The Vanishing, but hey, better late than never. I was so very close to finally monetizing my extensive and utterly useless knowledge of Venus flytraps, sundews and pitcher plants. I’ll have to write my own plant story, I suppose. Watch out, world.
I can see it now: A The Vanishing spin-off entitled The Famishing, and it will be about my starving, mutated, couch-sized sundew, and how it’s not sticky anymore, because I refuse to feed it the annoying neighborhood kids. Hit me up, Disney. My schedule is wide open.
“Full disclosure: We put more time into the dad plant jokes than we did into a deep dive into the plants themselves,” Rob told me. “Those are spot-on. We have killer plant jokes.”
“We have extras we can share with you, from the cutting-room floor,” Hilary added.
I might just have to take her up on that, actually. Bonus plant dad jokes sound rather delightful, though the ones that made it into the show are already top-tier.
From a planning angle, I was rather interested in how the Goosebumps show team transitioned from the first season into The Vanishing. Last year’s reboot surprised a lot of fans who were accustomed to the middle grade book source material, as well as the original Fox Kids TV show, both of which leaned into safer scares. Last year, the Disney+ show aged up the characters and story, which now dealt with high schoolers and darker themes.
“It’s an anthology series,” Rob began, “which we kind of love, because it’s the nature of the books. It just felt like that was in the spirit of Goosebumps, and in the spirit of R.L. Stine never having a happily-ever-after at the end of his stories—they always end with a twist—so the first season ended in the canon of Goosebumps. When we explored doing a season two, we just wanted to swing the pendulum and do something totally different. Hilary and I zeroed in on New York pretty quickly. We thought it would be really fun to show a different side of New York and show the urban/suburban vibe, if you will, and shoot a gritty, grounded, relatable story again with a whole new set of characters.”
“For fans of season one, and with the anthology, we wanted to make sure we were consistent in tone, and that our storytelling had some of the same DNA,” Hilary continued. “Much like in season one, in season two, we took a central mystery and had each of our characters [experience] their own individual journey and connection to that mystery and have their own ‘books’. We were able to [choose] another set of beloved Goosebumps books—Stay Out of the Basement being one that we loved, that’s one of my favorites that we didn’t get to do in season one. So then when we built out that world and mapped the characters to these books and their stories, so that there is a feeling of like, this isn’t totally random and new and everything is different. If you enjoyed season one, you’re going to enjoy season two as well.”
Being a fellow writer, I went on to ask about the Goosebumps writer’s room. I imagined it to be a dank dungeon coated in sentient green slime, echoing with bloodcurdling howls and cackles, buzzing with malevolent spectral energy. Definitely haunted, obviously. I needed to know what their creative process looked like, how the team decided on which lucky Goosebumps titles were to be included.
“Oh, you mean after the chaos?” Rob joked.
“It all starts with a Goosebumps tote bag [and] all these books that we would lug around,” Hilary said. “We were in-between offices, going different places and looking at the covers of these books. In all honesty, [we were] getting inspiration just like you do as a kid in the bookstore, picking out a Goosebumps title and the way you want to be scared. We would really move around the covers and be like ‘oh, this is a great one’ and ‘this is a great one’ and the story starts to appear, like ‘it would be cool if a character did this’ or ‘it would be cool if we focused on this’.
I won’t spoil anything, but there are several nods to classic horror movies and books throughout The Vanishing, and Rob confirmed this.
“We like to dive into the subgenres of horror, and we reference a lot of our favorite films and stories of a certain era and pay homage. Pretty much every scene in every episode you can do some detective work and figure out where that came from.”
And speaking of horror, there’s the notion of writing teenagers, it’s own mortification. I wanted to know: What were some of the specific challenges?
“The challenges are that Rob has to live with two teenagers while writing the show,” Hilary joked.
“I follow my kids around with a recorder and then I immediately text Hilary—Oh my God, you’ll never guess what they just did and said!” Rob noted. “My son is 18, my daughter is 16. I’m in the hot zone of that all day long. But I’ll say this: Especially this generation, they are exposed to so much more. They’re so mature. They’re just different, every generation is different. They’re dealing with trauma, for real. There’s no monster or terrifying plant in the world that’s going to be scarier than being a teenager going to high school right now. We try to be true to that and try to have an honest portrayal of what they’re like and what they’re going through when we’re writing.”
Perhaps this is why Goosebumps remains impressively evergreen; the delicate balance of comedy and horror is something kids (and adults, too) genuinely appreciate. Life is so reliably and brutally challenging, and I suppose it’s stress-relieving to laugh and scream in alternating fashion. I’ve seen the first six episodes of The Vanishing, and David Schwimmer does an excellent job of juggling these opposing and somehow therapeutic psychic states.
“You know, comedians are so good at horror,” Hilary explained. “They’re really walking the same line. Preparing for a joke or a scare are very similar, how you have to lead up to it and the timing it requires. Schwimmer is, one, an amazing person, but he’s [also] such a great actor, such a great director, and somebody who got this project right away, got the character of Anthony. It was amazing to have somebody that is operating at such a high level and gets everything about this process. It made it so much easier for us and he elevated this season beyond with his talent.”
Speaking of David, apparently he got pretty engaged with the botanical aspects of his role, and judging by my own intense interest in plants, this probably means we’d make for pretty good… pals? I’m absolutely not going to make a Friends joke. Nope. I won’t do it. Or maybe I just did? I’m sorry, David. Restraint isn’t my forte.
“To his credit, a lot of the botany jokes are from Schwimmer,” Rob said. “He was like, I’m an actor, I’m going to play this role. He did his research, he connected with botanists. He started sending us all these pictures for the t-shirts. He wanted to always be wearing a t-shirt that had a botany pun on it. So if you keep an eye on it, there’s a lot of that stuff in [the show]. In episode two, he cuts into his arm. It’s such an amazing performance, if you were there on the day [of shooting], because nothing is there. He’s miming the whole thing. We literally shipped that off to Weta and tried to match this performance that was perfectly intense and hilarious in moments. He poured his heart into this part. It’s awesome.”
I’ve really been enjoying the second season of Goosebumps so far, and yes, being a carnivorous plant fanatic does make me a tad biased. Still, I think Rob and Hilary (and team) have done a solid job with the writing and it was great to catch up with them and dive into some behind-the-scenes details.
It’s the new year and honestly, I’m grateful. Would sending them thank-you Venus flytraps via FedEx be considered an overstep? Let’s find out.
Goosebumps: The Vanishing premieres on Disney+ and Hulu on January 10.
