Tales to Give You Goosebumps (R.L. Stine)

The House of No Return:

Robbie, Lori, and Nathan are pretty dickish for being kids. The story starts with them waiting outside a supposedly haunted house. They convinced a kid that he could only join their group if he could stay inside for a full hour, but he comes racing out pretty fast. Robbie then decides to target Chris, a new kid in their school.

Chris makes it clear that he's not interested, and he even says that he's too afraid to go in the house. Robbie keeps riding him, but Chris doesn't care about joining their club. They then decide to trick him into going to the house. Robbie asks him to come out trick or treating with them. When they get to the house, they grab his arms, shove him in the house, and tell him to stay for an hour.

After an hour passes, they wonder what happened. Lori thinks he's showing off, but after 20 minutes, he still hasn't come out. They wait for 10 more minutes before going inside to check things out. Two scary ass ghosts walk out and grab them. They ask about poor Chris, and the ghosts just laugh. Turns out that Chris ran away pretty fast, but he promised them that if they let him go, he'd make sure that three more kids would take his place. The ghosts then let them know that they'll be there forever.

Teacher's Pet:

Becca and Benjy are best friends who can't wait to meet their cool new science teacher. Turns out that they wound up with a different teacher named Mr. Blankenship. He seems like a typical boring teacher (ha!) until he starts bringing in new cages and tons of snakes. Becca hates snakes so much that she starts having nightmares about the snakes coming home with her and attacking her.

Becca notices a big tank that Blankenship recently added to the class. Though she wonders how big the next snake will be, he never adds anything to the cage. While helping him feed the snakes, she accidentally drops one of the mice and it runs away. He seems particularly upset, so she asks Benjy to come back with her later to investigate.

They sneak into the school late at night and see a huge snake in one of the tanks. The snake climbs out of the tank, starts forming body parts, and finally becomes Mr. Blankenship. Becca and Benjy run from the school and wonder what he'll do next. He acts perfectly normal during class the next day, but he asks them to stay late. Turns out that they make a deal not to tell on each other – him for being a snake monster and them for breaking into the school – if they come in every day and feed him new mice.

Strained Peas:

Nicholas is waiting for his parents and reading an Iron Man comic. When they introduce him to his new little sister Hannah, he points out that his sister has the same evil birthmark as the villain in his comic book. His parents laugh it off, but Nicholas knows that his sister is evil.

Hannah has a birthmark that seems to pulse and glow, and he watches her eyes change color, but his mom thinks it's normal. She also spits green peas all over the house, and she covers his parents all-white room with his paints. His parents keep blaming her for everything that his sister does. When she comes at him with a pair of scissors, he finally snaps.

Cut to a phone call from the doctor. Turns out that Hannah isn't really his sister. She was switched at birth with another baby. They take her back to the hospital to pick up his real sister, and his parents decide to change her name to Grace. He spends all day with Grace to figure out if she's okay and decides she's normal. At the end of the night, Grace makes a weird noise and starts talking. Just as he runs from the room, he hears her warning him to watch out once she starts walking.

Strangers in the Woods:

Lucy has to spend the summer with her great aunt Abigail, but she does get the chance to bring her dog Muttster. Her dog acts really weird. He howls and barks, doesn't go in certain places, and just acts different. Her aunt also seems different too. Her cookies don't taste the same, she drives like a crazy person, and she warns Lucy about stepping foot in the woods.

The first night, Lucy sees weird lights in the sky over the woods. After she sees the lights a second time, she decides that it must be aliens. She overhears her aunt telling someone on the phone that it will all be over soon and when she turns, Lucy sees that her face is green. She decides to run away and runs into the woods, leaving her dog at home. She hears a bunch of voices and someone says to bring her to him.

It turns out that there was a movie shooting in the woods, which explains the lights and other stuff. Lucy heads back to see her aunt waiting up for her. Abigail explains that her face was the result of a homemade face mask and all the other stuff happened because she lost her glasses. She couldn't read the ingredients very well and drove crazy because she couldn't sleep. Later that night, Lucy finds her aunt's glasses and goes to give them back to her. When she opens the bedroom door, she discovers a crazy monster with tentacles staring back at her and speaking in her aunt's voice.

Good Friends:

Dylan is outside playing with his friend Jordan when his sister Ashley comes out and starts playing with her imaginary friend. Dylan keeps saying he needs to do his homework, but Jordan tells him to blow it off. He points out that his older brother Richard will tell his parents if he doesn't, and Richard ends up lecturing him from his bedroom window about doing his work.

The two boys then start teasing Ashley about her imaginary friend. She says her friend is real, and they have a big fight. They later decide to play a mean trick on her. While she's outside playing, they take Richard's tarantulas out of their boxes in his room and plan to sneak up on her and toss them on her head. Richard shows up at the last second, yells at him about what he's doing, and shouts about him playing with Ashley and Jordan. Richard then tells him that he needs to grow up and realize that Jordan and Ashley aren't real, they're just imaginary friends.

How I Won My Bat:

Mike is the star pitcher for his baseball team until he goes through a slump. Suddenly, he can't hit a single ball thrown at him. After practice, he sees a man in a black suit standing and watching him. The man gives him a card and introduces himself as Mr. Smith, the curator of a local sports museum. He offers him a free lightweight bat as long as he promises to return it right after his next game.

He breaks the school record and then the state record at his next game. He's now the top player again and everyone wants to celebrate with him. Mike makes up an excuse to sneak away to the museum, and when he gets there, he can't get over how realistic the pictures and displays look.

Mike tells Mr. Smith that he wants to keep the bat. Mr. Smith thinks about it and finally says that he can keep it forever. Just as he starts to get excited, some weird feeling comes over him, and he becomes part of the display. Mike gets to spend the rest of his life in the museum, watching and listening as people talk about how realistic his display looks.

Mr. Teddy:

Willa is a spoiled rotten twelve year old. Her mom constantly buys her whatever she wants, which pisses off her older sister Gina. When they go shopping, she sees a cute teddy bear that she absolutely has to have. Her mom asks what she'll do with it because she doesn't have any more room, but she buys it for her anyway.

She names her new bear Mr. Teddy, introduces him to Old Bear that she slept with for years, and moves Old Bear to a shelf above her bed. When she wakes up the next day, Mr. Teddy is sitting by her window. Gina refuses to admit that she did anything, and things heat up. She wakes up one day to see her bear sitting on top of some broken porcelain eggs, and she wakes up on another day to see her dresser tipped over.

Gina constantly denies that she did anything wrong, but Willa convinces herself that it was her sister. She finally wakes up one morning to see Mr. Teddy standing in the middle of her room with a piece of fabric in his hand and surrounded by all of her toys broken and destroyed. Willa rushes downstairs, only to learn that Gina wasn't home the night before. Convinced it was the bear, she rips him into pieces and throws the pieces out the window. The only toy that escaped was Old Bear, which she grabs and hugs. As she thinks about how lucky she is to have him, Old Bear thinks about how she'll learn that she shouldn't have other things and how she will always be his.

Click

Seth is watching television when his dad comes home with a new universal remote that he just bought. After putting batteries in it, his mom comes in to lecture him, and he presses the mute button. It turns out that it actually mutes his mom. He then uses the rewind button to get more chocolate pudding at dinner.

Since it worked so well at home, he decides to try it at school. He uses freeze frame to freeze the classroom during a pop quiz so he can get the answers from a classmate, and he uses it to mute a lunch lady who lectures him on having too many desserts. When he pushes the mute button again, the woman still can't speak.

Thinking something went wrong, he looks for the remote and realizes that someone stole it. Seth and this guy Danny fight over the remote, which leads Seth to press the freeze frame again. A teacher rushes out, and he freezes her too. When he tries to make things right, the remote won't work. His classmates all start screaming, so he hits the power button, which leaves him in a dark black spot. Seth looks down to see what to do next and finds that the batteries in the remote are dead, leaving him there forever.

Broken Dolls:

Tamara hates her little brother because he won't stop breaking her dolls. After breaking her newest doll, she screams at him before she and Neal go to a craft convention with their parents. Her mom wants to get some new paint, while she wants to check out the dolls. She finds a stand filled with realistic looking dolls, and the older woman who runs the booth seems particularly interested in them. She offers Neal a cookie, mumbles something, and touches his head, which makes him act a little odd.

By the time they get home, Neal seems sick. He starts running a fever, and he just gets worse throughout the night. They find some weird sticky jelly on his head, but their parents wonder if he had an allergic reaction to something he ate. That makes Tamara remember the old lady, and she sneaks back to the craft fair thing.

She sees the old lady leave her booth for her trailer, and she sneaks into the booth. The dolls all start talking to her and asking her for help, and she notices a number of different dolls with blank faces. When she touches the head of one and notices the same jelly, she sees Neal's features appearing on the doll.

The old lady shows up again, and they have a big confrontation. The woman rambles about the new world forgetting about the old world and how kids go missing every day. She reaches for a jar of weird jelly, but Tamara grabs it, runs off, and tosses it in water, which causes the woman to disappear. When she gets home, Neal is back to normal. Cut to a few weeks later and she gets a package in the mail. It turns out to be a doll that looks just like the old woman. Feeling the evil in her home, she bets her little brother $5 that he can't break it, and he starts tearing it apart.

A Vampire in the Neighborhood:

Helga is the new kid in school, and Maddy and her friends think she's a vampire. She always looks really pale, has cold skin, wears old-fashioned clothes, and never really interacts with people. They decide to sneak over to her house but they can't really see anything.

Maddy invites her to do different things with them, but Helga always makes up excuses. She also makes up excuses why they can't come over to her house. The four of them sneak over again and watch her through her windows. When she sees them, Maddy jumps down and yells at her friends, who take off running.

They finally come back when Helga rushes out of her house to yell at them and ask them to stop spying on her. When Maddy finally asks her if she's a vampire, she agrees. Maddy tells her to show them her fangs, but she tells Maddy to show hers first. Maddy hesitates before showing her fans, and all of her friends show theirs too. Helga flips out because she was just joking, so they all gather around her and decide to take care of things themselves and turn her into one of them.