Witness… The Goosebumpy Stuff

It’s no secret that I owe a lot of my inspiration to R.L. Stine and the Goosebumps series. But I don’t think I’ve gone into full detail about exactly how much I was into all of those books, because I was into them. I mean, I never read every book in the original 62-book series, but I always intended to. I think. I’m not sure. Fuck, I still own all the books; they’re currently in an old, brown box in my closet. Maybe I should break those out and give ‘em a read. That is, if they aren’t all moldy and covered in multi-year’s worth of mummified corpses of spiders.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that there aren’t maternity clothes in there.

I can’t say what, exactly, piqued my interest about Goosebumps. Like I explained in the opening to S2 E2, “The Corduroy Bunny,” I was never the biggest fan of horror growing up. Today, I can appreciate good horror, like all the classic films, Halloween, The Exorcist, Suspiria, etc… buuuuut I haven’t seen any of those, and I’m not necessarily interested in checking them out anytime soon. Not out of fear; I’m pretty sure my tolerance for being scared by things in movies is high and doesn’t go beyond feeling the creeps. But beyond all the dark implications that surround horror stories, I don’t know if it goes beyond curiosity. I want to know everything, but I don’t necessarily want to experience everything. A perfect example of this can be the Five Nights at Freddy series— I’ve never played a game, nor do I intend to play a game anytime soon, but I’m fascinated by the intricate lore and keep up to date on the ongoing story and theorizing that surrounds it, and am actually kind of pissed off that it’s been treading into sci-fi territory over the last several years and not just being a “strictly horror” story. Yes, even I’m surprised I care that much. Let’s give this whole thing a 🤷‍♂️ and put a pin in it, ‘kay?

So anyway, Goosebumps and my fandom towards it. Let’s see, how far did I take it? I subscribed to the newsletter, and was always excited to see what the titles for upcoming books would be. I chose Stine’s autobiography, It Came from Ohio, for a fourth or fifth grade book report focused on biographies, the culmination of which was an oral presentation given to the class (and I think invited parents) where everyone would dress up as their subjects. Boy, do I wish I had a photo of me dressed up as Stine… though I suppose it wouldn’t be that interesting, as I would merely have been dressed all in black, which is not too far from how I dress these days anyway, albeit my black shirts usually have some kind of geeky reference on them instead of just being stark like my soul, I mean, I’m chipper and happy weeeee…

One thing I also did was, well, basically rip Stine off and plan out my own series of horror-centered short stories for children, for which I dubbed a very original title, Scary Stories (not to mention, I didn’t realize I was ripping off Alvin Schwartz’s classic book of stories, but whatever, it’s not like mine was published). Like Stine, I started with titles and worked my way backwards to figure out what the story was. I even created logos for each story. But like many things I worked on as a child, I managed to start the project, but never finish it. I’m actually not even sure if I even started one story for this collection, let alone completed any. Although, one story I had planned, “Happy Jack,” did stick with me throughout the years, and eventually transformed into something I wrote for the now ended literary magazine Defiant Scribe. You can check out that story here, if you so please. (The fun logo for “Happy Jack,” by the way, was a Have A Nice Day smiley face with a bloody arrow sticking out of the forehead, which, now that I think of it, was kind of ripping off the logo for Watchmen, and I hadn’t even heard of that when I came up with the design. What is it with me and unintentionally plagiarizing as a kid?)

At some point, though, I started getting into Michael Crichton novels and began to stray away from those young adult novels with the bumpy, braille-like titles on the cover. But the impact Goosebumps had on me clearly never went away. I mean, look at this whole podcast! Shit, literally twenty minutes ago, I sent in an application to be a writer on a straight-up horror podcast, so clearly I have some weird shit in my brain that needs to be sorted out some how, and we can all blame Robert Lawrence Stine for that.

SMASH CUT TO: me as an adult. “The Secret in the Swamp,” like so many other episodes, was intended for an improv team. In this case, it was going to be for the trio, Boarding Party, which consisted of Peter Chapman, Sean Marney and Anton Shuster. An interesting choice of genre for them, considering they had a regular Endgames show called Space Trip, a somewhat serialized and improvised sci-fi series wherein they played the same characters every episode and were joined by a guest improviser who played the new captain of their ship. The captain would die at the end of every episode, and it was the audience that got to decide to manner of death. For the episode I guested, I played a slug admiral who was killed by an audience member who was a huge fan of the show and attended every performance and someone decided they wanted to incorporate him into the show somehow, so he doused my character with salt. Lovely.

Space Trip! From left: Sean Marney, Anton Shuster, Peter Chapman, me (pre-saltification).

The original intent for “Swamp” was for it to be some kind of Hardy Boys-esque tale, with the three members of Boarding Party being some kind of mystery-solving crew. Not a lot changed there during its switch from aspiring live show to aspiring podcast episode, but I did want to diversify the cast and not just have it be all male, especially after already writing an all male episode for this season.

Although, funnily enough, “Swamp” wasn’t even on my radar when it came to Season 2. I only decided to write the episode after having a really strange yet inspiring dream. The dream basically played out exactly like the episode: some friends and I had to cross a swamp, we were being stalked by a Marsh Man, the swamp contained some perilous creatures, and in the end we were all chased by a random dead leaf brandishing a butcher knife. I don’t think any therapist could tell you what the fuck that was all supposed to represent, but upon waking, I knew that it was the outline for the episode. And so, later that day, I wrote the whole thing in a matter of hours.

How I pictured the Marsh Man.

(Now that I think of it, this is kind of similar to the Goosebumps story You Can’t Scare Me, which had mud creatures. Ugh, is anything I do original?)

Casting the episode was a cinch. I knew from the get-go that Emily Markoe would be perfect for Meadow, so figuring that, I decided to make the episode a little half-reunion for the improv team Chesterfield. Chesterfield was a Harold house team for Endgames around the same time that I was on the house team There’s Hope. But unlike my team, Chesterfield had an almost supernatural bond from the get-go (save for one member who not only dropped off the team early on but seemingly dropped off the face of the earth? Hope you’re okay, Sammy!). Their chemistry was undeniable. So it just became a matter of availability. Emily was into it, as were Kayla Karban and Steve Kate, but the reunion became surefire once the ever-busy Jarvis Johnson found time to take a break from “trying his best.” We were on!

Clockwise from left: Steve Kaye (Kenny), my off camera pic, Emily Markoe (Meadow), Jarvis Johnson (Bookworm), Kayla Karban (Kathy).

And the chemistry was still there. The sparks were electric. The recording was a blast. We met up on Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon (after therapy for me!) both because Emily was in the middle of a cross-country road trip with her boyfriend and therefore on central time, and because Jarvis had a standing Twitch stream appointment at 4. The Chesterfield alumnus breezed through the script. When recording, I’m usually following along in the script and not the Zoom, but for this, I gave into my curiosity several times to peek in on the four friends’ boxes because it sounded like they were having such a good time. During the first set of pickups (which are always done straight after the read through), there was almost an unspoken contest to see if and how they could make each other laugh. I think Jarvis won, but he had the added benefit of autotune on his side.

I don’t know if Jarvis is using autotune here, but whatever he said, it certainly cracked Emily up.

And that’s about it! The end result is, I think, a very fun and playful episode (with that dark edge, of course). Who knew you could get a good forty-four pages/minutes out of a weird-ass dream involving sentient foliage?

—Andy

Clearly, it wasn’t just Emily who was cracking up.