By Gill Pringle
Tonally, Goosebumps takes more than a few leaves out of the Gremlins and Goonies playbooks, mixing scares with laughs, and keeping it safe for the kids. “First and foremost, it’s just going to be really scary and really funny at the same time,” Jack Black told FilmInk on the Goosebumps set. “And that’s a tricky little combination. At the heart of it though, there’s a story about coming out of one’s shell. R.L. Stine has cut himself off from the real world because he had a tough childhood. There were a lot of bullies in his life, and he wasn’t the popular kid in school, so he creates this world of monsters and demons and then he imagines them terrorizing the town as an act of revenge on all the kids who didn’t play with him and like him. I wasn’t the popular kid at school either. I made people laugh, but it was kind of a defence mechanism. So I can relate to that a little bit…creating worlds to defend one self.”
Demons, monsters, and the creation of bizarre new worlds is nothing new to Jack Black. With his comedy rock band, Tenacious D, he and musical partner, Kyle Gass, surround themselves with demonic imagery and heavy metal-inspired madness, best distilled in their riotous 2006 movie, Tenacious D And The Pick Of Destiny. “We have a fascination with eighties heavy metal music, where The Devil was always front and centre for the big rock acts,” Black smiles. “It was kind of used as a promotional tool for all those bands. We just think that’s funny now in retrospect. That’s such a big joke; if you weren’t selling enough records, you’d put The Devil on the cover of your new album, and start rumours that you’d sold your soul to The Devil; suddenly, the sales were through the roof and you’d have a packed house. It was almost like a requirement. If you were in a band in the eighties, there had to be a demon of some description in there. I was a sucker for that stuff. There was something cool about monsters and demons and devils. I could see the allure.”
