Slappy, the evil puppet, is finally back in Goosebumps

The new episode of the Disney+ series is inspired by one of RL Stine’s most famous stories.

After sharing the first five episodes of the new series Goosebumps on Friday October 13, Disney+ schedules the last three weekly. Today comes like this The evil puppeta story directly inspired by a handful of RL Stine books devoted to Slappy, a particularly Machiavellian ventriloquist puppet.

First called Diabolo in the French translation, this puppet kept its English name for the first series adaptation in the 1990s, as well as in the films with Jack Black released in 2005 and 2007 (in the first, the star even lent him his voice, in addition to brilliantly playing the author of the novels). Here too, it is under the name Slappy that he returns, with a new appearance, however.

Because like this new concept designed by Rob Letterman (behind the first cinematographic opus) and Nicholas Stoller (Without Sarah nothing works, Bros…) East not adviced for kids under 12 years old (and even less than 14 in the United States), its creators can afford to offer a slightly creepier, and even more cruel, Slappy.

In this episode, Mr. Bratt, the new teacher played by Justin Long, tells the story of Harold Biddle (Ben Cockell) to the students who are victims of various curses. At first struggling to get their attention, he then frightens them with the disturbing story of this puppet capable of taking power over the minds of his puppeteers. To make them commit increasingly violent acts. We then discover what really happened to the young man thirty years earlier, and why he comes back to haunt the younger generation.

Here’s an excerpt from Slappy’s return:

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If the construction of Goosebumps in a linear series, and no longer an anthology with a new monster/curse in each episode, could be confusing until now, it takes on its full meaning in this episode 6, pillar of this first season. The puppet was awaited by fans of Goosebumps, as he is a central character in the books and previous adaptations. Unveiling it in 1993 with Night of the puppetsStine brought it back several times in his novels, as he loved describing the nasty, manipulative and limitless side of this horrific counterpart to Pinocchio.

For this version, Slappy was a key element of the promotion, teased on the poster and in the trailer as soon as the project was announced. Seeing him arrive so late has kept viewers in suspense so far, and the wait is rewarded with a particularly sadistic, and playful, narrative, as this story plays with different writings by RL Stine, not just the Evil puppet.

From there, the story will focus fully on the threat of Slappy, and will continue to alternate between scenes from the present and bloody flashbacks. Two more episodes to find out how far this terrible, goosebump-inducing villain will go…

The trailer for the series:

When Ryan Gosling starred in Goosebumps as a teenager