Goosebumps: The Vanishing is the second season of Disney+'s recent take on the iconic franchise, which adapts a handful of new books for streaming audiences.
The first season saw a cast of characters tackle intersecting stories that pulled from Night of the Living Dummy, The Haunted Mask, The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, and Go Eat Worms.
While Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger, Season 2 took the show in a whole new direction with a new cast of characters and locale—though there is still hope that Season 1 characters could return.
These Are the Books Goosebumps Season 2 Adapts
Stay Out of the Basement (Book #2)
Episodes 1 and 2 of Goosebumps: The Vanishing covers one of the most popular books in the original series: Stay out of the Basement, Book 2.
Out of all the books, this story retains the most similarities from the original.
This is where audiences are first introduced to David Schwimmer’s Anthony Brewer, a tortured botanist who, upon researching a mysterious clue from a missing persons case, ends up uncovering a plant monster in his basement—a new species of life. As he tries to hide the scary shenanigans unfolding, his two children and their friends start to discover what’s happening.
The big difference between the book and the show is that the original story actually features a plant monster, while the show has a mysterious substance posing as a plant for the first two episodes.
This story is one of the keyframing devices for the entire overarching narrative of The Vanishing.
The Haunted Car (Series 2000, Book #21)
The Haunted Car was first published in September 1999 and follows a young man named Mitchell Moinian, who is obsessed with cards. After his dad buys a new car for a cheap price, Mitchell soon finds himself stuck with a legitimately haunted car with twin ghosts attached to its tragic history.
The actual ghost angle of its connection to Goosebumps: The Vanishing is pretty slim.
In the series, after a possessed Trey (Stony Blyden) gets crushed by a car, his remains turn into a black ooze that seeps into Trey's prized car. In Episode 3, Cece (Jayden Bartels) and Alex (Francesca Noel) take a joyride in that same car, which proves haunted, as it has a mind of its own and can heal any damage it gets.
Though there aren't any ghosts, Trey's essence quickly leaves the car and gets his actual body back.
Monster Blood (Book #3)
Episode 4 of Goosebumps: The Vanishing touches on Monster Blood (a book that went on to get three sequels), and sadly, the connections are incredibly slim.
The book sees a kid named Evan find a weird can of Monster Blood slime in a novelty toy shop that starts to grow exponentially with each passing day—eating everything around it and in its path.
In the show, Monster Blood is the product of the black particles getting into Cece's Kombucha. After drinking it, she starts to get sick and coughs up the titular entity that starts to grow.
It ends up chasing her, Devin (Sam McCarthy), and Galilea La Salvia through the NYC Subway system. Surprisingly, no locals seem to notice.
Sadly, one of Goosebumps' most iconic creations only gets less than ten minutes of screen time and has a radical redesign from its classic look.
Warning - The rest of this article contains spoilers for Goosebumps: The Vanishing.
The Girl Who Cried Monster (Book #8)
The fifth installment of the new series follows The Girl Who Cried Monster, though the title of the actual episode reflects how it follows a boy instead.
The original book follows 12-year-old Lucy Dark, whose constant tales of fake monsters get her in trouble when she runs into a real one disguised as the local Librarian—and no one believes what she's seen.
None of the specific details of the book crossover to the show, but the overall premise remains the same.
CJ (Elijah M. Cooper) sees a monster (the possessed version of Dr. Brewer), and his family doesn't believe what he says. CJ is also seen at the beginning of the episode telling fake stories, much like the original book.
Sadly, the best part of the book, the massive last-act twist, is absent in this version of the story, which is disappointing, to say the least (even if it makes sense given the story being told).
The Ghost Next Door (Book #10)
Sam McCarthy's Devin Brewer gets the spotlight in Episode 6, which adapts The Ghost Next Door (retitled "The Girl Next Door").
In the show, Devin meets Eloise Payet's Hannah Parker at a park. Little does he know, that Hannah is a ghost—and one of the missing people from 1994 alongside his father's brother.
At its heart, the show presents its adaptation as a simple Ghost Story, and at its core, is similar enough to the original book. But this adaptation is another example of the show excluding a defining twist that made the original tale so memorable.
The book follows Hannah Fairchild, who starts to suspect that the kid next door is secretly a ghost. It turns out she's the real ghost and had passed away five years prior.
Welcome to Camp Nightmare (Book #9)
The penultimate episode of Goosebumps: The Vanishing takes from Welcome to Camp Nightmare—and the two have similarities, but they aren't the same story by a long shot.
The book follows a rigged summer camp experience where kids are being tested in a secret lab to see if they can follow the rules and maintain strong morals––something that isn't revealed until the very end of the book. The bigger twist is that this entire society and experiment was happening on another planet entirely.
The big connection between the show and the book is that aliens are involved, as is a big scary lab, though in an entirely different form.
The Vanishing reveals that the site the kids in 1994 went missing from was a secret facility containing a trapped alien spaceship. A flashback in Episode 7 shows that this lab was created to study the entity, and the scientists themselves playfully coined the creepy place Camp Nightmare.
Needless to say, things go wrong, and nearly all of the scientists perish.
Invasion of the Body Squeezers: Part 1 & 2 (Book #4 & #5, Series 2000)
As first hinted at via The Goosebumps: The Vanishing's official social media account, the finale of the series is inspired by Invasion of the Body Squeezers, a story that originally played out over two books.
Aside from both following aliens, which can go inside of bodies, the connections between the two are slim.
The books follow a kid realizing that an alien invasion is underway from slimy green aliens who give fatal hugs that end in possession.
The Vanishing's aliens reveal themselves through the people who previously were infected by the black gas seen throughout the season. In the finale, they rip apart the affected person, revealing a rabid alien dog creature in their place.
By the end of the episode, their story is mostly resolved when the alien spaceship is able to break free of its imprisonment (though it seems all those infected were lost forever).
Goosebumps: The Vanishing is now streaming on Disney+.
Make sure to check out The Direct's interviews with the cast of Season 2, who all revealed what their own childhood nightmares were growing up.
