George A. Romero's Unmade Goosebumps Adaptation Details Land Online

Though best known for directing landmark horror movies like Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Creepshow, filmmaker George A. Romero frequently was tapped by Hollywood to adapt popular properties into movie which tragically never saw the light of day. Not only did the director previously pen a script bringing the first Resident Evil video game to life, which would later be thrown out in favor of Paul W. S. Anderson's version, he also penned an adaptation of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps for the big screen when the children's book series was at its most popular. Now the first details have arrived from the project.

As part of their George A. Romero Archival Collection, the University of Pittsburgh Library System's Horror Studies branch has released a huge article compiling details for Romero's abandoned Goosebumps script. According to the Pitt library (H/T Bloody Disgusting), the film didn't take the meta approach that the 2015 movie would eventually follow (which had Jack Black playing R.L. Stine in a Jumanji-like story) but instead was an adaptation of just one book in the series, its first, Welcome to Dead House. Rather than being a straight forward adaptation however it would have a bit of a Romero flair.

In their post, they write:

The Stine book is set in a town called Dark Falls whose inhabitants are, secretly, the living dead. When the Benson family moves in, young Josh and Amanda discover that a flashlight beam is sufficient to crumble the town's residents into dust. Every year, the town must feed on the blood of a new family to sustain their undead existence. Romero retains the basic scenario and all of the major character names but tweaks the story in revealing ways. In the Stine book, the zombification comes, a la Return of the Living Dead, because of a mysterious gas that escapes from a local factory. Romero makes the capitalistic origins more emphatic: the town patriarch, the wealthy Foster Devries, has in death possessed the town. The state of living death experienced by the residents stemmed from a supernatural power that Devries has now shared with/imposed on the town.

They further note that this idea of a living house was something that Romero had toyed with in the past with a script called Apartment Living, another unproduced project whose details can be found at the archive (sitting alongside the likes of an unmade version of Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Pet Sematary, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Turn of the Screw).

The Pitt library broke down how Romero infused this children's book adaptation with his trademark political leanings, adding:

Romero liked to talk about his Dead movies as taking stock of and analyzing America every decade or so. This wasn't a sequel to Night, Dawn, and Day, but it was a zombie movie. And in this return to zombies, Romero a truly hellish nightmare: being stuck in an awful job with an overbearing boss for all eternity.

You can read the full breakdown here.

(Cover Photo by Lars Niki/Getty Images for Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film & Scholastic)