The Babysitter Takes Tubi Back to R.L. Stine’s Pre-Goosebumps Era
Long before Goosebumps, R.L. Stine made babysitting a nightmare. Now his 1989 YA horror novel is getting a Tubi Original adaptation in 2027.
Babysitting is supposed to be a pretty straightforward gig. Watch the kid. Make sure nobody burns down the house. Collect your money. R.L. Stine would like to add one more responsibility: survive the night.
R.L. Stine's The Babysitter is officially coming to Tubi in 2027, adapting the author's 1989 YA horror novel about a teenager whose attempt to earn a little extra money puts her inside somebody else's house while danger starts circling much closer than expected.
The announcement arrived during Tubi's R.L. Stine panel at New York Comic Con on October 11, just two days after R.L. Stine's Pumpkinhead 2 premiered. We've already taken a spoiler-free look at how the sequel expands Stine's Redhaven, but the newly announced adaptation is sending this partnership somewhere very different. The upcoming movie marks the fourth collaboration between Tubi and Stine, following two Pumpkinhead movies and the previously announced Afraid of Clowns.
This one also reaches much further back into Stine's bookshelf. Before Camp Nightmare, Fear Street High, or Slappy entered generations of readers' lives, Jenny was already learning how quickly a normal teenage job could become a reason to check the locks twice. Suddenly, staying home alone sounds like a terrible business decision.
What Is R.L. Stine's The Babysitter About?
Sixteen-year-old Jenny has a goal: earn enough money to attend a prestigious writing program. Unfortunately, the job market has other plans.
Jenny accepts a babysitting position despite reports of a prowler targeting girls around her age. The situation becomes harder to dismiss once threatening phone calls start arriving and news of a dangerous fugitive adds another possible suspect to an already uncomfortable situation.
As detailed in Bloody Disgusting's announcement, Jenny isn't short on people to distrust either. Several men around her begin looking suspicious for very different reasons, turning the mystery into more than figuring out who's making the calls. She has to decide whose behavior is merely unsettling and whose might actually put her in danger.
The setup gives Stine a particularly effective YA pressure cooker. Jenny isn't wandering toward danger because horror logic requires a bad decision; she's trying to earn money for something she wants. Leaving the job means giving up part of that independence. Staying means accepting that her instincts may be warning her for a reason.
We'll leave the mystery there. The book has been around since 1989, but the movie deserves a chance to make its own introductions.
Before Goosebumps, There Was The Babysitter
First published in 1989, The Babysitter arrived three years before the first Goosebumps book and became the beginning of a four-book series. Three sequels followed between 1991 and 1995, which means Jenny's terrible employment experience apparently wasn't enough to make babysitting permanently unavailable.
The books also belong to a different corner of Stine's horror legacy. Goosebumps became famous for monsters, cursed objects, and supernatural trouble aimed at younger readers. The Babysitter plays with a fear that requires much less imagination: being young, alone, responsible for somebody else's child, and unsure whether the adults around you can actually be trusted.
There's something fitting about returning to the novel now, when plenty of viewers may know Stine first through the worlds that came afterward. Instead of another monster from the Goosebumps shelf, the adaptation gets to reintroduce an earlier version of his storytelling where paranoia, suspicious behavior, and one ringing phone could carry the nightmare.
The Pumpkinhead Team Is Switching Horror Lanes
Tubi isn't handing its latest Stine adaptation to complete strangers. Jem Garrard, who wrote and directed both R.L. Stine's Pumpkinhead movies, is writing and executive producing The Babysitter. Trevor Calverley will direct, with Blue Ice producing the film.
Garrard also gets a different adaptation challenge this time. The Pumpkinhead films grew from shorter Stine stories, leaving plenty of space to build Redhaven and expand their mythology for feature length. The Babysitter arrives with a full novel's worth of characters, suspects, red herrings, and reader expectations already waiting.
Instead of asking how to make a short story bigger, the screenplay has to decide what deserves to survive the trip from 1989 to 2027. A threatening call from a stranger lands differently when the phone is no longer attached to the house, and being unreachable isn't nearly as easy as it was when Jenny first took the job. Preserving her isolation while updating the world around her could become part of the adaptation's trick.
No casting has been announced yet, so the identity of our next teenage horror heroine remains a mystery.
R.L. Stine's Tubi Era Is Just Getting Started
Four movies into an ongoing partnership, Tubi is starting to build a pretty interesting tour through Stine's horror career.
R.L. Stine's Pumpkinhead and its sequel turn Halloween traditions into supernatural trouble, while R.L. Stine's Afraid of Clowns is preparing to send a sinister circus troupe into Redhaven. The Babysitter expands the map in another direction. Instead of another Redhaven story, Tubi is reaching into Stine's earlier YA bibliography for a standalone mystery built around suspicion and isolation.
Taken together, the projects aren't simply repeating the same flavor of R.L. Stine horror. They're pulling from different points in his career and different reasons generations of readers learned to distrust perfectly ordinary things. Tubi's Terror on Tubi has plenty of ways to stay appropriately nervous while we wait. R.L. Stine's The Babysitter is expected in 2027, with an exact premiere date and cast still to be announced.
Jenny needs the money. We need casting news. The phone can stop ringing now.
