The charm of a movie does not always have to be based on hype but sometimes it is on how an audience relates to it. Sometimes it is both and when that happens it becomes one worthy movie to watch. This is the case for the movie Goosebumps which we first learned from Marcus, thanks to YouTube.
Goosebumps is a movie based on a popular book and TV series back in the days when its present young fans like our son weren’t around yet and when TV were showing more entertaining and intelligent shows. Fortunately for us there is the trusty Hollywood that allows us to reminisce the good old days while seated beside our ever curious children and as we blindly dig our hands into same cheesy popcorn bucket.
What I personally like about Goosebumps is its appeal to people who like to read and write regardless of skill. As a so-called blogger, it never ceases to amaze me how an author’s imagination could be translated into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, into pages, and finally into a book with a plot that is entertaining, interesting and more importantly, one that millions of readers could very well relate to.
For moviegoers as young as Marcus, the idea of monsters becoming real may be something new. Goosebumps, however, surely isn’t the first to show monsters coming out of books. Do not ask me to cite examples as I am bad in recalling movie titles but I just know that there have been others ahead of Goosebumps yet it does not mean that all is lost.
For one, it is worth noting the presence of the actor Jack Black as one of the main casts. Like his previous roles in movies like School of Rock and Nacho Libre, Jack Black continues to prove that he is among the top actors not just for comic relief but also when there is a need to inject the element of mystery. In the movie Jack Black plays the role of R.L. Stine who is the original author of the Goosebumps series that became popular in the 90s. The movie’s story goes that R.L. Stine was once outcast—could be true in real life—who isolated himself from the bullies of society and, eventually, in the confines of his room wrote stories that have monsters in it. He wrote so much stories of the same genre that he has lost count how many monsters he has created which later on became too much to handle when everything got out of his books and terrorized a sleepy village in Madison, Delaware.
Goosebumps should also remind us that there were times when authors spend endless nights on their typewriters—or others still do?—to create that one story that would soon make it into the bookshelves and bed sides around the world. Yes, the typewriter, the machine, that makes weird mechanical noise that could be very well mistaken as monsters by kids of the touchscreen age.
What fascinates me about people like R.L. Stine and even Stephen King is their influence. They create stories to escape reality, their readers read to escape the same reality—and others would even be so inspired that they become good writers in their own right. Let us not forget, however, whether we like it or not, that reality bites—literally and figuratively. That there aren’t really monsters, that fantasy has its end, and that the last page exists.
The good news, as R.L Stine said in the movie, “there are three elements in my stories, the start, the end, and the twist.” True enough just when everything seems to be cliché, good guys beat bad guys, Goosebumps makes its audience look forward to something until its next installment returns, until we see the invisible boy. We now crave for more.
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In hindsight, there are real monsters in our midst. Some in the form of bad politicians, bad traffic, bad boss, and even bad afternoon shows. Each one of us are battling our own monsters and there is one that lives inside Marcus which he continues to fight head on. It is one that’s cannot be seen by the naked eye but is much scarier than those of R.L. Stein’s.
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Mood: 3/10 Honks! (I will get the blood extraction result today. Fingers crossed.)
Marcus Can Blog 