Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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While developing R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead, filmmaker Jem Garrard and Tubi’s Vice President of Original Scripted Content Josh Van Houdt had to suss out the content boundaries of their modern spin on the classic Nightmare Hour short. For their version, which follows a young teen boy (Bean Reid’s Sam) who works to find his missing brother in a town haunted by an evil crop curse, the answer was pumpkin guts.
“We had a major discussion about the R.L. Stine brand, and if we were doing Pumpkinhead as TV-14 or TV-PG,” Van Houdt tells The Hollywood Reporter. “When I was talking to S&P, and we asked what we can show if we do TV-14, not TV-PG, my favorite response from them was, ‘You can do vegetable gore, but not regular gore.’ I was like, we can have pumpkin guts, but we can’t have blood. Great, we can work with this. Vegetable gore it is.”
For three decades, Hollywood has adapted Stine’s sprawling library of over 300 middle grade and young adult horror titles. “Back in the ’90s, when we started the Goosebumps TV show, I was writing a book a month, so I had no time to work on the show at all,” Stine tells THR. “But it was fun for me to see what other writers could do. They would take my story and then go off in their own directions with it. The same with movie adaptations.”
From Disney+ and Sony to Warner Bros. and Skydance TV, Stine adaptations have regularly embraced his family-friendly gateway horror and genre-comedy approach, with the occasional more mature take, like MTV’s Eye Candy or Netflix’s Fear Street. In some ways, it’s become a crowded landscape, but one that still presents an opportunity for the FAST channel and its 110 million monthly active users.
“We have such a large audience, and we have such a mix of audience [demographics],” says Van Houdt. “I was trying to determine if there were ways we could bridge some of them together — try to meld them and figure out if we could have content for them that isn’t the hard horror if they don’t want that. R.L. Stine fit in perfectly because R.L. Stine’s a brand himself.”
Along with being a longtime fan of Stine, Van Houdt had previously worked at SyFy, where he was introduced to Front Street Pictures, the production company behind the 2010 anthology series The Haunting Hour. After arriving at Tubi, he reached out to see if they still had the IP, and when they did, they began discussing options, including the potential for another series based on the books.
From those conversations, a three-picture deal with the Haunting Hour studio emerged. The development process focused on not just “activating the right stories, but figuring out which were right to get that nostalgic audience of 40-plus that did read them, along with their kids who are now watching stuff,” the Tubi exec says. Within that, there was also an opportunity to expand the streaming horror, film, and Stine spaces into a place they had never quite gone together.
“When I started talking to Jem about it, we asked, what are our reference points here, TV shows aside? Movies either go fully comedic, like Goosebumps the movie, or are animated like Coraline and Monster House,” Van Houdt notes. The duo “kept coming back to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” alongside other ‘80s horror titles with younger protagonists, like Gremlins and The Gate. “There’s a lot of ‘80s stuff that feels like what we were trying to do,” the exec adds. “And obviously, Stranger Things is an easy reference, but it wasn’t really what we were going for.”
While Stine is synonymous with aspects of the ’80s and ’90s, Tubi wasn’t interested in making a period piece. So the ad-supported streamer, which has a larger Gen Z audience, opted for something in between — a place where tube TVs exist alongside modern band references. “There’s never a need for a cell phone, but if there is, we use a landline. It was very important to us to not make it feel dated, but also keep that ’90s feel to it.”
They also wanted to invoke the spirit of Stine, a pendulum of sentimentality and scares. “What makes an R.L. Stine story is absolutely heart. He never talks down to his child characters. He’s never condescending. His work is genuinely scary for a kid, and he balances that so well with fun and adventure,” says Garrard. “That’s really the anchor for all our movies and where we started with Pumpkinhead.”
For Stine, The Nightmare Hour short was a logical gateway into adapting his work. “I don’t think about movies or television when I’m writing. I just try to write a decent book. But if there’s a good story there, people have a lot to work with. With the short story Pumpkinhead, it’s really one of my best Halloween stories, so they had a lot when they started to adapt it,” he says. “And my scary things are not just scary; they’re also funny. They’re laughs, they’re twists, they’re surprises. I think they really get that.”
After its October 2025 release as part of the “Terror on Tubi” lineup, Pumpkinhead’s viewership landed with the exact kind of mixed-demographic audience the platform was looking for. “It spent two weeks in the Top 10 on Luminate,” Van Houdt tells THR about how the platform judged whether its Stine strategy had paid off. “We get things on the Luminate chart all the time, but spending two weeks out there is really good for us. Then the feedback. People were excited.’”
Coupled with a slightly divisive ending, Pumpkinhead and its haunted town of Redhaven proved there was demand for more. “I never approached the first movie thinking it would be a franchise,” Garrard says. “And the intention with the sequel was being able to tie up Sam’s arc after we had some viewers [upset] at the first movie. The sequel is not an adaptation; it’s a continuation. It’s building on the universe I created in the first one, but thinking, if we’re turning this into a franchise, I want to tie up neatly the story of the first movie with Sam and dig deeper into that mythology while leaving it in a place to open up other stories in this world.”
Part of how Pumpkinhead 2, which debuted Oct. 9, was able to do that was by casting Cassandra Peterson. Also named Cassandra, her witchy character — who was slightly rewritten after casting to match the actress’ “almost Stevie Nicks vibe,” according to Garrard — was given deep ties to the town of Redhaven, helping the sequel establish more of the universe’s history, linking offscreen events before the first Pumpkinhead film to the present-day story.
“The big question I always ask when adapting Stine’s work is why, and that started to build this whole backstory of this curse, and included creating the town of Redhaven for the movie,” the director says. “When we were looking at a sequel and other stories in that universe, it was like, let’s use Redhaven as this town where these weird things happen, and expand on that mythology.”
This establishment of this family-friendly version of Castle Rock led to Pumpkinhead 2’s final scene, which teases the arrival of a menacing, giggly presence from Afraid of Clowns. For the third film in that initial Front Street and Tubi deal, Garrard is returning to write and direct. “When I was at Syfy, I started out in their co-productions division. We had very low budgets, and Jem could elevate things. We are a budget-conscious network, so getting that elevation on what we’re doing is amazing,” Van Houdt says about sticking with the writer-director.
The choice to go with Afraid of Clowns was the director’s idea, and initially gave the Tubi exec some pause. “There’s a lot of clown content, so what could we do that’s different?” Van Houdt recalls thinking. “What could we do in this world that’s the next natural step?”
It was one among a handful of Nightmare Hour and Haunting Hour shorts Garrard was looking to develop that tapped into their love of creature features, prosthetics, and color. “A lot of the shortlist — there was a creepy carnival story in there. There was a werewolf story. Those were the ones I was drawn to, and thought would make really fun adaptations,” the director says. “Stine’s got some great creepy ghost stuff as well, but I was more drawn to playing with color. And there are so many people that are already terrified of clowns without you having to do anything.”
The choice also gave Tubi flexibility around its release strategy. Unlike the Pumpkinhead entries, Afraid of Clowns came down to knowing “it wasn’t going to be a Halloween movie again” — one way the platform is expanding its approach to Stine adaptations. “The world that we built with Front Street Pictures is Pumpkinhead, Pumpkinhead 2, and then Afraid of Clowns. Afraid of Clowns will have a different cast and a different story, but it’s all relevant to each other,” Van Houdt tells THR.
And just like its pumpkin predecessors, Afraid of Clowns will have the same target audience, despite the new threat. “Doing kids’ horror after doing so much adult horror forces you to be more creative. So the distinction for me isn’t necessarily how scary something is. It’s the kind of horror you’re using. Writing these [films], there’s an enormous amount of tension and frightening imagery — this real sense of danger you can bring to kids’ horror without relying on graphic violence,” they said of their approach to Stine’s shorts.
Garrard also tells THR they want Afraid of Clowns, and the recently announced R.L. Stine’s The Babysitter adaptation, to feel like their own films as well as a cohesive part of the larger Redhaven world. “Each story will stand on its own, and you’ll be able to watch it having never seen any of the others. But I would also love to have those little cameo parts,” the filmmaker explains while discussing the potential for character crossovers. “Cassandra as the witch definitely has way more history there than just the spell of the cursed book in the Pumpkinhead story, so I would absolutely love to bring her back.”
What does that shared universe mean for the upcoming Point Horror adaptation? Both the exec and director say that in this case, audiences should expect something different for The Babysitter, whose lead teen Stine likens to a perfect horror character. “I cannot tell you how many kids wrote to me and said, ‘I’ll never babysit again,’” the best-selling children’s horror author tells THR. “She’s not in her own home. She’s totally vulnerable. It’s a perfect horror character, being a babysitter.”
“I was drawn to The Haunting Hour and Nightmare Hour shorts because they’re actually darker than [Stine’s] Goosebumps stories. There are so many of those stories where the kids don’t win. I wanted to honor that. I didn’t want a neat bow on everything, but you can also get away with that in a short. When you adapt it to a movie, it’s a tricky balance of tying up enough so people feel their time is well invested, and not giving the kid everything by having those real consequences Stine explores in The Haunting Hour,” Garrard says. “The Babysitter is also a completely different thing.”
“It was a really fun one to start with because we’ve got Pumpkinhead and Afraid of Clowns as gateway horror, and then we wanted to move into a YA world of what Stine’s universe would look like,” they add. “It’s one of his huge ones. I wanted to see how you make a 90-minute version of the first 20 minutes of When a Stranger Calls. It’s that feeling, a whole feature-length movie staying in that tension.”
The story of Jenny, a high school teen who becomes the target of a deadly killer while babysitting, will also see Garrard writing and executive producing, but directing duties have been handed off to Trevor Calverley.
“I have such a wonderful working relationship with Tubi, and we’ve got quite a few things planned, but for this round, it made sense. What we want to do moving forward, it’s almost like showrunning these projects. I will still be heavily involved in them, even through prep and production,” Garrard says. “I love directing, but we want to expand this universe, and there’s only so much I can do if I’m on set directing as well. It takes time from development and adaptation, so I’m excited for this next round to have a new director and a new voice to bring them to life.”
Both Garrard and Van Houdt confirm there are more Stine adaptations being considered beyond The Babysitter. That includes Point Horror titles, which could be released at any point in a given year, including non-Halloween holiday seasons. There are also four total books in The Babysitter series, though for now, the title is being developed as a standalone film, according to the filmmaker.
“I wanted to be as true to the book as possible, and the lead character, Jenny, her story is still at the end very open,” they tell THR. “So it would be a case of if the audience is really enjoying this, then we already know there are many other places we can take it.”
