Iconic children’s- and teen-horror author R.L. Stine chats to PEOPLE about Jack Black, who played him in Goosebumps (2015) and Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018)
“He keeps in touch. He’s a great guy,” Stine says of Black
The newest film adaptation of Stine’s work, Fear Street: Prom Queen, is on Netflix Friday, May 15
R.L. Stine has a lifelong pal in Jack Black!
The youth-horror author spoke with PEOPLE about his fondness Black — who played Stine onscreen in Goosebumps (2015) and Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018) — in a chat surrounding Netflix’s upcoming Fear Street: Prom Queen.
“He keeps in touch. He’s a great guy,” says Stine, 81, of Black, 55. “We worked well together, and we just had a great time.”
The author says he was recently in Laguna Hills, California, giving a talk at a library in town. And while Black wasn’t in attendance, “He sent a note over, saying he wished he could be there, and he’s just wonderful,” Stine says.
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R.L. Stine in New York City on Oct. 21, 2015; Jack Black as Stine in Goosebumps (2015)
Another member of Stine’s family who’s a huge fan of Black’s, and has been forever? His 11-year-old grandson, Dylan, who was a toddler when the first Goosebumps movie premiered.
“I think some of his first words were, ‘Jack Black, Jack Black,’ ” Stine says of Dylan, also sharing that his grandson has seen Black’s new A Minecraft Movie “three times” already.
In the 2015 Goosebumps movie, Black’s Stine — alongside teens played by Dylan Minnette and Odeya Rush — must face off against all of the boogeymen from the entire Goosebumps series once they’re magically unleashed in the real world.
Aside from that movie and its sequel, Goosebumps inspired a TV show both in the ’90s and one more recently, the latter of which premiered its second season this past January.
Fear Street: Prom Queen, meanwhile, is adapted from Stine’s 1992 book of the same name, which was the 15th installment in his original Fear Street teen-horror series.
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The movie stars India Fowler as Lori Granger, “a gutsy outsider” who “puts herself in the running” for her high school’s prom queen amid some tense (and potentially deadly) competition, per a synopsis from Netflix that adds, “[When] the other girls start mysteriously disappearing, the class of ’88 is suddenly in for one hell of a prom night.”
Stine tells PEOPLE that unlike the movie — in which the cast and crew “heightened the scares,” which he approved of — he himself has “never done anything R-rated. Even my life isn’t R-rated.”
Prom Queen, on the other hand, is “a bloodbath,” the author adds. “It makes Stephen King’s Carrie look like a Hallmark movie.”
Fear Street: Prom Queen slashes onto Netflix Friday, May 16.
Read the original article on People
