R.L. Stine's The Babysitter Books Being Adapted Into TV Series

For generations of kids, R.L. Stine provided a gateway into the weird and wonderful world of [...]

By Jenna Anderson

For generations of kids, R.L. Stine provided a gateway into the weird and wonderful world of horror fiction. The author's young adult stories have made their way into several other mediums over the years, most notably in the Goosebumps series of films. According to a new report, another beloved R.L. Stine franchise - The Babysitter - is officially headed to television. Lookout Entertainment, which has worked with Stine since 1996, recently tweeted that it is working on a television adaptation of The Babysitter with Chernin Entertainment (The Greatest Showman, Planet of the Apes). With only this tweet to go off of, there's currently no indication of where the series will end up or any other details.

The Babysitter is a series of four novels from Stine, which were published between 1989 and 1995. The series follows Jenny Jeffers, a sixteen-year-old girl who is targeted by menacing phone calls while babysitting a young boy named Donny. In subsequent novels, Jenny continues to have strange and sinister phenomena happen to her while she is taking babysitting gigs, as she worries that her past is coming back to haunt her.

While The Babysitter might not be as well-known of a franchise as some of Stine's other work, the series is cited as having helped establish the author as a major player in the children's horror genre.

This news about The Babysitter comes as another Stine franchise, Fear Street, is set to get a trilogy of feature films. All three films are set to be directed by Leigh Janiak (Scream: The TV Series, Panic), with each taking place in a different era in the fictional town of Shadyside, Ohio -- the 1990s, the 1970s, and the 1600s.

The cast for those movies includes Gillian Jacobs (Community), Sadie Sink (Stranger Things), Kiana Madiera (The Flash), and Olivia Welch (Unbelievable).

What do you think of The Babysitter being adapted into a television series? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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