| Director | Rob Letterman |
|---|---|
| Genre | action film, comedy horror, fantasy film, film based on book, ghost film, monster film, werewolf film |
| Runtime | 103 min |
| Country | Australia, United States |
| Budget | $58 million |
| Box office | $158.3 million |
Following his father's death, teenager Zach Cooper and his mother Gale move from New York City to Madison, Delaware, where the latter has a new job as its high school's vice-principal. Zach befriends neighbor Hannah and fellow student Champ. After getting to know the former, her father warns Zach to stay away from them.
That night, Zach hears a terrified scream coming from Hannah's house and believes she is in trouble. He calls the police to investigate, but her father convinces them that it was nothing as Gale leaves Zach with his aunt Lorraine while she supervises a school dance afterwards. Fearing Hannah is in danger, Zach tricks her father into visiting the police station while he and Champ infiltrate his house. The duo find locked manuscripts that catalog entries from the Goosebumps franchise; Zach unlocks the one cataloging The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena and its titular character emerges from it. Aided by Hannah, they track the beast to an ice rink, where her father reimprisons it in the manuscript.
Hannah's father is revealed to be R. L. Stine, the disturbed genius behind the Goosebumps franchise, who originally began it to cope with severe bullying, but the monsters escaped into reality due to his overactive imagination, forcing him to detain them in their manuscripts. Back at Stine's house, the quartet encounter the vengeful Slappy the Dummy, freed from his origin manuscript as he incinerates it, leaving no way to reimprison him, and escapes with the others.
As Slappy liberates his fellow monsters from them, causing havoc around Madison, Zach formulates a plan of recapturing the monsters by writing a single story, but it can only be done using Stine's supernatural typewriter on display at the school. En route, Zach witnesses Hannah becoming ghost-like in the moonlight and, at the school, Stine reveals to him that his "daughter" is actually Hannah Fairchild from The Ghost Next Door, whom he created to cope with loneliness, although Hannah herself is oblivious. Stine starts writing the story, based on the events around them, while Zach and Champ warn everyone as the building comes under attack.
As the monsters break into the school, Slappy finds Stine and injures his fingers before he can finish the story. The quartet travel to an abandoned amusement park as the create a diversion, but Slappy tracks them down and subdues Stine using the eponymous blob from The Blob That Ate Everyone as the other monsters arrive. After the remaining three manage to finish the story, Zach hesitates to open its manuscript because Hannah will be caught in it as well, but Hannah reveals she knew the truth all along; she opens it, bidding farewell to Zach as she is reimprisoned along with the monsters.
Some time later, Stine begins working as a substitute teacher while starting a relationship with Lorraine. After class, he reveals to Zach that he brought Hannah back into reality by rewriting her origin book. As the couple leave together, Stine incinerates the copy, but then finds his typewriter writing by itself. To his horror, My Best Friend Is Invisibles Brent Green was omitted in the monsters' reimprisonment and now prepared to avenge himself.