It’s been a good year for people being possessed. There was the Danish chiller Attachment, and then the excellent Aussie creep-fest Talk To Me, and now the new Disney+ Goosebumps series – based on the books by RL Stine – will see another malevolent spirit take over the body of some poor unsuspecting sap. Watch the creepy trailer here:
In the new series, Justin Long is a cheery young teacher who pitches up at a supposedly haunted old house near his new school. Something terrible happened to a boy called Harold Biddle in that house three decades previously, and in short order Long’s teacher is ambushed by a plaid shirt-wearing spirit while he’s doing a crossword. It flies down his gullet in the form of black smoke and soon enough he’s doing the kind of creepy grin that is the definitive hallmark of a possession.
At the school, five students take it upon themselves to sort out what’s going on, and it seems to involve a cursed Polaroid camera, some freaky masks which look a little bit like the one Bond baddie Safin had in No Time To Die, and the bad things their parents did when they were at school with the dear departed Harold Biddle. As Miles McKenna’s James puts it: “Oh my god – we’re murder-nepo babies!”
Goosebumps returns to Disney+ on Friday 13 October. Of course it does.