Goosebumps The Vanishing TV Review: David Schwimmer leads a fun and scary second season
Plot: Begins with fraternal twins Devin and Cece adjusting to life with their recently divorced dad, Anthony. When the duo discovers a threat stirring, they quickly realize that dark secrets are among them, triggering a chain of events that unravel a profound mystery.
Review: Growing up, I was slightly too old to enjoy Goosebumps. While I was graduating from Christopher Pike novels and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series to the more mature novels of Stephen King, tons of kids entered the gateway horror of Stine’s fun brand of scary stories to tell in the dark. The anthology series was a hit with kids looking for a good scare, and the big-screen films starring Jack Black amped up the comedy for a big-budget adventure. Disney+ and Hulu’s reboot of the franchise was a successful, scary take on the source material back in 2023, and this year’s sophomore entry is equally good. Led by David Schwimmer in a very different New York story, Goosebumps: The Vanishing is a solid franchise continuation for the small screen that favors jump scares over slapstick. With shout-outs to several memorable books in the Goosebumps catalog, The Vanishing takes a different approach than the first season but works just as well.
Shifting the setting from Stine’s preferred location of generic suburban America, The Vanishing takes Goosebumps to New York City. Set in Gravesend in Brooklyn, The Vanishing opens in 1994 with a group of teens exploring an abandoned military facility when they are seemingly killed by a black goo that reduces them to dust. Fast-forwarding three decades to the present day, the story shifts to twins Cece (Jayden Bartels) and Devin (Sam McCarthy), who are staying with their dad, Anthony (David Schwimmer), as he takes care of his mother’s home. Anthony is a botanist clearing out his childhood home as his mother has moved into assisted living. Anthony is still dealing with the death of his brother, one of the teens in the opening sequence. Cece and Devin deal with their own challenges, including Devin’s crush, Franke (Galilea La Salvia,) and her new boyfriend, Trey (Stony Blyden). They also run into CJ (Elijah M. Cooper) and Alex (Francesca Noel), neighborhood kids and new friends. When Trey challenges Devin to revisit the site of his uncle’s death, the group unleashes the same menace that killed the kids thirty years earlier.
Where the first season of Goosebumps blended the adult cast with a new group of teens facing off against the menacing dummy Slappy and a slew of interpretations of supernatural beings from the novels, there are few adults in the cast of The Vanishing. David Schwimmer is great as Anthony, who bridges the two time periods in the story along with Jen (Ana Ortiz), Anthony’s brother’s girlfriend and mother to Alex. The other significant adult character is Ramona (Sakina Jaffrey), a scientist whose father (Sendhil Ramamurthy) directly connects to the military facility. In the two-part opener, Goosebumps: The Vanishing tackles a twist on the book “Stay Out of the Basement” before shifting to episodes named after books like “The Haunted Car”, “Monster Blood”, and “Welcome to Camp Nightmare”. All of the stories, rather than serve as direct adaptations of the standalone books, are incorporated into the overall season narrative. While the story works better overall this season than it did in the first, the reveal as to what is actually behind the generational horror did not work as well as I had hoped.
What I liked the most in the first season of Goosebumps was the teen cast. While Justin Long provided the adult connection in the first season’s story, the young protagonists are all fully realized characters with a stake in the main story. Season two gives us a nice ensemble led by Jayden Bartels and Sam McCarthy as likable siblings who do not act like twins. Both Francesca Noel and Galilea La Salvia are good romantic interests for the main characters and never get relegated to being secondary. The same cannot be said for Stony Blyden and Elijah M. Cooper, as CJ and Trey are the least developed of the six teens. Because the story is centered on the Brewer family, we are meant to care most about Cece, Devin, and their dad, but this sometimes gets muddled in the middle of the season. There are a couple of weak entries in the middle of the season, something rectified in the solid and unexpected finale.
Pokemon: Detective Pikachu helmer Rob Letterman, who directed the 2015 Goosebumps film and co-created and directed entries in the first season of this series, returns to oversee The Vanishing. Letterman wrote two episodes and directed one in the first season. For The Vanishing, Letterman co-wrote three and directed three alongside Erin O’Malley, Gillian Robespierre, Oz Rodriguez, and The Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sanchez. The intensity of the horror this season feels much stronger than in the first, making it a natural continuation of what we saw a couple of years ago. While it is nowhere close to what we got in Netflix’s Fear Street films, Goosebumps remains one of the scarier teen-centric series to debut in a long time. There are funny moments in the season, but the focus is on being scary, and the production values and visual effects make this feel like it is not designed for kids.
While it will not phase most horror fans, Goosebumps: The Vanishing is vastly scarier than the big screen takes on the subject matter. Rivaling the frights from the 1990s version of Goosebumps and even Are You Afraid of the Dark?, The Vanishing is a solid series that introduces younger audiences to the horror genre while still being entertaining for adults. Once the series unveils the big twist on what is going on in Gravesend, some may be disappointed compared to the supernatural origins in the first season. Nevertheless, Goosebumps: The Vanishing works far better than I anticipated and benefits from David Schwimmer doing a solid job as the main adult in a cast of young newcomers. Disney and Hulu missed a great opportunity to debut this series during Halloween, but it is still worth a watch during the wasteland of mediocre programming coming in January.
Goosebumps: The Vanishing is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
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