The Many Challenges of Bringing ‘Goosebumps’ to Life

Goosebumps, based on the popular series of young adult horror novels by R.L. Stine, premièred simultaneously on Disney+ and Hulu in October 2023. Published by Scholastic, “Goosebumps” is one of the bestselling book series of all time, with more than 400 million books in print in 32 languages.

In the series, which was created by Rob Letterman and Nicholas Stoller, a group of five high school students unleash supernatural forces upon their town (never a good thing), with manifestations ranging from zombies to a haunted mask to unpleasantly invasive worms.

Unsurprisingly, given the shortage of reliable zombie actors these days and the well-documented difficulties of getting worms to take direction, the series depended on visual effects to realize its narrative goals.

With a new season set to premiere in January, we spoke with Senior VFX Supervisor Lawren Bancroft-Wilson about the many challenges he faced, in particular having to produce a wide variety of creatures and special effects for a single series, and the invaluable help we received from leading effects studios, including MPC, MARZ, and Pixomondo.

Dan Sarto: Why don't you start by giving me an overview of the visual effects for which you were responsible across the first season?

Lawren Bancroft-Wilson: One of the tricky things with Goosebumps was that we were taking four or five different stories and letting them play out in individual episodes, so that it almost feels like an anthology when it starts. So the first five all have our main characters experiencing their own story, and then it dovetails in the last couple of episodes. When we started to break it down, the work that was involved was really specific to each book. I mean, we were looking at a bipedal zombie person. Then it’s worms, a very effects-heavy worm simulation. It required totally different strengths to get the shots done and we had to figure out which of our vendors was best for each one.

Really, each episode was a different handoff. Episode 3 was duplicating, or twinning, so a character becomes like nine or ten of themselves. That's a slow process of figuring out how to do repeated takes, how to really work with the director to get the performances and interactions, so the actor's able to play each character well. There, visual effects are standing back and just saying this is what we need, and helping the director to get what they need.

Episode 4, the worm episode, was a big one – trying to figure out how to create this massive simulation, including worms chasing someone on a motorcycle. There had to be ground interaction, and other effects on the environment. That one was definitely the hardest one, because it was really testing what you can do in terms of heavy effects simulations on a shorter TV or episodic schedule.

Episodes 5 and 6 get into a bit more surrealist stuff. Those are episodes about this notebook, and about characters being trapped in the notebook. If a page rips in the real world, how does that affect our virtual, storybook world? We had to find a way to map effects. Say the page gets wet, and the ink starts to run – how do we translate that to the world we're in? If the page is crumpled, how do we see the walls crumble as the character gets away?

Rob Letterman, the showrunner and one of the creators, is very good at understanding that a lot depends on the supervisor you get, and so we really went and kicked the tires of each VFX company, saying, "You might be good at this, but who is it we're going to be working with at your company to help realize this?"

DS: Can you talk a little about some specific episodes and which companies handled them?

LB-W: The first episode was handled by MPC because of their animation background. The zombies and everything had to feel real. We needed to know that we can get realistic physics, even though they're zombie creatures. Realistic run cycles. You shouldn't be able to tell whether there's a stunt actor in there or there's a CG one.

Episode 2, the troll episode, went to MARZ, which is a really good creature company in terms of creating models. The visual effects supervisor was Cristian Camaroschi, who had actually worked on one of the Goosebumps movies. They were really great at building this troll model with great detail, which was able to show a lot of emotion through the facial animation, as well as  transforming from a mask into a face.

I already talked about Episode 4, with the worm simulations. We used Pixomondo for that. We needed a company that had a good depth of FX artists, and we needed a supervisor who was able to crack all the different levels of the worms – when they're small individuals going into the body, and then a large worm creature that we haven't seen before. It had to perform with our characters, and then on top of that, we had to figure out how to do the FX simulations to make sure it all feels like it's constantly generating, that it's basically eroding and leaving worms behind. The supervisor was Carlo Monaghan, who joined our team for Season 2 because he was so great and Rob was just blown away by him.

Episodes 5 and 6 was a mix of companies working on the environment and the simulation stuff. We worked with Distillery for some of that, and they also came on to do our big environment snowstorm. They really knew how to do good environmental extensions, and they built a beautiful cliff, as well as all the effects simulations involved with it.

There are a lot of changes in the episodic world, where, after we've shot, we have to reevaluate what we're going to be doing. There's not always the ability to have everything 100% prevised and then just adopt the previs on the day. We get a lot of curveballs thrown at us through production. Environments change, locations change, and schedules change. We have to basically compress what would be a larger amount of storytelling into a smaller amount, and we have to refigure how we execute that in VFX.

DS: As far as the practical effects versus visual effects, how much could you actually decide beforehand what was going to be done in-camera and what you'd have to augment, or do completely in CG?

LB-W: Rob and I are very similar in that we always want to try to do as much in-camera as possible, and we also want to always have that touchstone of seeing what something in-camera looks like. Even if we know we're going to change something, we want to attempt it, we want to see what it is. When you're working on a show where you’re dealing with things that everyone sees in real life a lot, or that people have a familiarity with, it’s good to get a touchstone so we can all start from the same place, and then we can creatively say whether something should be one way or the other.

For the football sequence, for example, we actually had players out there tackling and jumping. Then the real players were removed, and we put in our zombie players to do things that our stunt actors couldn't necessarily do. There were things that we wanted, like charges on the field, but we weren't able to use any actual flames on that field, so we had to add that. We always start off trying to do as much practical as we can, but we always try to make sure that what we're trying to do is going to be safe and we're not putting anyone at risk.

There's a scene where Harold Biddle is eating worms out of a bowl. We put a mix of produce, gummy worms and other stuff in there, and he went to town eating these. Then we added some CG worms after to give a little bit of extra fight to them. There's stuff like that, where you could just say, "We're just going to do it all in CG and do it later," but the problem is you get into that uncanny valley. It always helps to have something filmed.

You want to make a really engaging and amazing thing, and sometimes that means we stick exactly to what we shot. Then there are other times where the story evolves in a way where you say, "Well, we actually need this extra thing, and we can't go back and shoot it, so let's do the vis effects of it." It's always a conversation. My entire career has been us sitting in a room, getting our marching orders or getting the script and thinking, "Okay, how can we do this? What can you do? I'll do this.” We just figure out what works best and what's going to let the director get the best performance out of the actors. That's always a really big thing – we want to make sure that we're not in the way of performance, that the storytelling comes first.

I always think of vis effects as being a multiplier. How can we use it to multiply what we get elsewhere, in terms of time and money, and especially for special effects? It's like special effects can do one amazing thing, and then we'll do the next ones, which maybe has a quicker reset time. We'll steal a bit of that first amazing one and put it into the others, and just help everyone multiply what they do.

DS: Every visual effects supervisor I talk to is like, "Lighting, lighting, lighting.” They always want to shoot something practical, if only to catch the lighting. Lighting on a spooky show is especially important. In something that's got this creepy lighting going on, does it add a layer of difficulty, or is it just always difficult?

LB-W: Lighting is always incredibly important. DPs have to be able to set up and get stuff going, and they always are trying to light how they envision a scene. We're always working with them to try to know exactly what their intentions are, so that we can carry those intentions in post.

The DPs for this season, Tom Yatsko and Steve McNutt, like to play with very, very dark stuff. They want everything darker, darker, darker. I think it’s great. A consistent and strong vision by a director of photography makes our job and visual effects much easier, because we can know what look we're going for, and we can match that look. I think, for us, it's not whether something is brighter or darker. In the end, things tend to look quite a bit better when the lighting is very intentional.

I would say the harder thing about our series is that it includes a lot of fire. One of the key story points is about a character who died from a fire, and we see those fire elements come up quite a bit. Working in dark and then having fire added in – where we had to do a lot of CG effects simulations – was a real balancing act, making sure that Tom and Steve could add some interactive fire to the plates. With that interactive, real fire as a baseline, when we add our fire, it feels like it lives in there.

DS: Last question: did you do any previs or postvis on this? Were you using storyboards? How did that work?

LB-W: We started off with some previs for the football sequence, to basically just try to get our layout of what the field is, what lenses we need to use to make it feel proper size, and then figuring out how we have to do the animation. It's a level of techvis at that point. We did a lot of that throughout and we did a lot of postvis.

Once it gets to postvis, it's a very short schedule because our animation tends to run at the same time before we're locked. We can call it postvis, but really we're adjusting the edit around the animation, on which Rob is very, very focused. You cannot get any animation by him that doesn't sync up, where continuity is not there, or physics isn't there. We were cutting as we were doing the animation. We did a lot of that just to make sure that performances were there, that the editorial made sense.

There's a constant back-and-forth between editorial timing, pacing, and our animators designing what's happening, with Rob essentially directing the performance of our creatures and everything with the editorial. It's almost like directing on set, saying, "Okay, let's do this take again." He gets that opportunity with vis effects, to continually redesign the postvis as we edit.

Jon Hofferman is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster, an educational and decorative music timeline chart that makes a wonderful gift.