Goosebumps, on Disney+ & Hulu (s1 no longer on Hulu)
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Caution: spoilers.

This series was originally released on both Hulu and Disney+, with the first five episodes dropping on October 13, 2023, and the next five releasing weekly after that. I watched the first four episodes in October, on Hulu, but then fell out of the habit of watching it, because of my executive dysfunction. Eventually (in early 2024) I discovered that the series had been removed from Hulu, so I added it to my watchlist on Disney+, but I didn't resume watching the series until March 2025. I finished it in June. Unlike the 1990s "Goosebumps" TV series (which I haven't seen, unfortunately), this series isn't exactly an anthology. Some episodes, particularly in the first half of the series, do have episodic plots based on different cursed items, but the show mostly tells a serialized story. Honestly, I feel like the early plots were sort of shoehorned into the ongoing story, rather than feeling like organic parts of it. Overall, I couldn't manage to care about the show or its characters as much as I wanted to, but it wasn't bad.

In 1993, a teenager named Harold Biddle dies in a house fire. Thirty years later, a high school English teacher and aspiring author named Nathan Bratt (Justin Long) moves to Port Lawrence after inheriting the Biddle house. A group of teens have a Halloween party in the house before Bratt moves in, and one of them, Isaiah Howard, finds a Polaroid camera whose pictures show tragic future events. He eventually sees monsters on the field while playing football, but he's the only one who sees them, aside from Nora Parker (Rachael Harris), the mother of Isaiah's friend, Lucas. She warns Isaiah's father, Ben, that Harold Biddle has returned to seek revenge against them and their friends, for something they did to him in 1993. Meanwhile, Mr. Bratt moves into the house and becomes possessed by Biddle's ghost.

The second episode shows the Halloween party from the perspective of a girl named Isabella Chen-Lopez, who finds a mask that makes her more extroverted when she wears it. It eventually influences her to attack people, but in the end, she gets rid of it. The third episode again resets to the Halloween party, this time from the perspective of a guy named James Etten. After he hit his head on a cuckoo clock, he becomes stuck in a time loop. He keeps attempting to leave the house, and each failure creates a duplicate of himself who does escape. The duplicates later trap James in a mine, and impersonate him. But they are destroyed by Isabella, Isaiah, and Isaiah's friend, Margot Stokes, and James is rescued. In the fourth episode, Lucas witnesses his mother, Nora, kissing Margot's father, Colin, and realizes they're having an affair, of which he informs Margot. Lucas is later possessed by worms he had found at the Halloween party and taken home. They make him feel no pain, which gives him the courage to perform a potentially deadly stunt, but he's stopped by Margot and Nora. After Lucas throws up the worms, they form a monster, which the three of them manage to kill. But when Nora tells the police about the monster, she is sent to a psychiatric ward. In the fifth episode, Margot's mother, Sarah (Lexa Doig), returns from Seattle, where she's been staying during a trial separation from Colin. Isabella's mother, Victoria, is the doctor in charge of Nora, and she wants to prevent Nora from revealing the truth about what all the kids' parents had done thirty years ago. But Nora is eventually released from the hospital. Meanwhile, Isaiah breaks up with his girlfriend, Allison, and has feelings for Margot, but doesn't do anything about it, because Margot begins dating Lucas. Mr. Bratt gives Margot a scrapbook, which gives her visions of the past when she reads it. She and her friends learn that their parents had inadvertently caused the death of Harold Biddle, after trying to befriend him. They had also stolen a suitcase from Biddle's house. At the end of the episode, Mr. Bratt tells the five kids that he'll tell them what was in the suitcase.

It's at this point, in episode 6, that the show becomes even more serialized. In 1925, Bratt's great-grandfather, Ephraim, had bought a ventriloquist's dummy named Slappy, to revitalize his floundering magic act. Slappy, who turns out to be "alive", gets Ephraim to retrieve the coffin of a man called Kanduu, and tries to get him to read a spell that would bring Kanduu back to life. But Ephraim has a horrifying vision that causes him to refuse, and hide Slappy in his basement. In 1993, Harold, who has trouble making friends, finds Slappy and the two of them become friends. Harold also becomes friends with Sarah, though he doesn't trust her friendship. Slappy begins making him do mean things, so Sarah and her friends steal the suitcase containing Slappy, accidentally causing the fire that kills Harold in the process. In the present, Mr. Bratt finishes telling the kids his story, but is upset when they believe Harold was the one at fault. So he reveals himself to be Harold, and traps them in the scrapbook, along with the real Bratt. They eventually escape back to reality, after Bratt takes back control of his body. But later, Biddle resumes control of him, and retrieves Slappy from the remote location where he'd been hidden. Slappy makes Bratt/Harold do terrible things, but he's eventually stopped, and Harold moves on to the afterlife, after throwing Slappy off a cliff.

Everyone thinks all the horrors are finally over, but of course they eventually turn out to be wrong. Even greater horror is in store for them, all because Bratt needs a new ending for the book he wrote about the events that had transpired in the first eight episodes. I won't go into details about that, but I will say Bratt comes to regret what he'd done. I still think it was pretty awful, though. As an aspiring writer myself, I can't imagine I'd ever do anything like what Bratt did, and I think that's true of most writers. Because damn. But whatever, it does make for a more interesting end to the story, and pays off events from earlier flashbacks (and new flashbacks in episode ten). The good guys win in the end, but the series ends on what I'd call a cliffhanger, except that the story is over, so we'll probably never get to see what comes of that revelation.

The series is followed by "Goosebumps: The Vanishing", which is considered a second season, but with a completely new story and new characters. So in that sense, it becomes an anthology by season rather than by episode, just like American Horror Story or something. But I still tend to think of it as a new series, mainly because it is on a different page from the first season, on both Disney+ and Hulu. Anyway, I haven't watched it yet, but I do look forward to it.