For years there’s been talk of a Goosebumps movie – after all it’s one of the biggest selling series of children’s book ever – but they’d never quite found a way to make it work. Now they’re doing it meta-movie style, with Jack Black playing Goosebumps author R.L. Stine, whose books actually keep creepiness out of the real world.

Here’s the synopsis: ‘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.

The first trailer is below, and you’ll be able to watch the movie when it’s released in the UK February 2016. [Read more…]

After quite a while in development where moviemakers were trying to work out how to translate the massive success of RL Stine’s books onto the screen, despite the fact it’s essentially an anthology with all sorts of different stories.

However now they hope they’ve got it right and have released our first look at Jack Black as Stine in the Goosebumps movie.

In EW Black says in his take on Stine, “Even though I’m playing a real person, this is obviously a fictionalized version of his life and nothing that happens in this movie actually happened to him, other than him writing all the books. So I felt like, I was just going to approach it as a character, doing what I thought was most dramatically interesting and right for what was needed. I also got to meet R.L. and he’s a really great guy. Really smart and funny and sweet. But I made [the character] more of a sort of curmudgeonly dark, brooding beast master. So from the very beginning, I was taking liberties. I think he’s cool with it though. [Laughs] He’s been on set and he actually did a little cameo. He saw what I was doing and he was digging it. Or at least he pretended like he was digging it.”

The plot revolves around Stine’s teenage neighbour bringing the author’s most creepy creations to life, and its up to the author’s daughter Hannah to capture the monsters that are running amok.

Don’t expect to see it for a while though, as it’s not due out until August 7th, 2015.