Between the Goosebumps and Fear Street series, R.L. Stine has written a large quantity of horror material for kids. The Fear Street series of scary books for teens, which are about everything from vampires and ghosts to dangerous humans, began in 1989. Three years later, Stine introduced Goosebumps, a tamer line of short books for young readers with preteen protagonists facing any number of monsters, ghouls, and creatures. Collectively, the two series comprise well over 100 books.

Stine was in a rhythm of churning out one new Goosebumps book each month when Scholastic, his publisher, was approached by Protocol Entertainment with a proposal to adapt the novels as an anthology TV show. Not only was the timing perfect since Stine’s books had become so popular, but kid-friendly scary shows and movies were seeing big successes. There was Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? TV show about kids telling each other scary stories, the return of The Addams Family, plus Halloween themed movies like Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The Goosebumps TV show debuted 30 years ago on October 27, 1995 on Fox Kids in the US. It would run for four seasons through 1998 with 74 episodes that adapted nearly every Goosebumps book that Stine had written.

Goosebumps was filmed mostly in Toronto and Markham in Ontario, Canada where there were plenty of average looking homes and rural areas that could be used for wilderness scenes. The show featured several up and coming Canadian actors, including Ryan Gosling (“Say Cheese and Die”), Laura Vandervoort (“The Haunted House Game” and “Deep Trouble: Parts 1 & 2”), A.J. Cook (“Don’t Wake Mummy”), and Hayden Christensen (“Night of the Living Dummy III”).

A very important factor to the show’s success was in the masks and creatures that would torment the protagonists. Ron Stefaniuk and Alan Doucette were responsible for producing that work, which included creating Slappy the evil ventriloquist dummy for the “Night of the Living Dummy” episodes and the evil masks in “The Haunted Mask.”

Since Stine was so emersed in writing the books, his wife, Jane Stine, was involved in the TV show, ensuring that the adaptations were faithful to his stories. Part of that work was approving that scripts walked the fine line between not being too scary (it was marketed toward elementary and middle school aged kids) and keeping the frights so that it didn’t become comedic.

Each episode opened by showing a man in a dark coat and hat walking up a hill that overlooks a little town, carrying a briefcase with “R.L. Stine” inscribed on the side. The case opens and paper flutters into the town, symbolically unleashing Stine’s stories to become episodes of the show. The intro was accompanied by a catchy piano and organ theme song composed by Jack Lenz. Check it out below, but viewer beware – you’re in for a scare!