Telling Rob Letterman ( Goosebumps 2015, Detective Pikachu) and Hilary Winston ( My Name Is Earl, Community ), the executive producers on Disney+’s Goosebumps: The Vanishing , that I’ve grown carnivorous plants for over 30 years wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card. But it’s exactly how our Zoom chat began a few weeks ago. I told them how watching this second season was, in effect, like going to church.
A strange, hungry, vine-choked church, sure. But church, nonetheless. “I’m sure you had a few notes,” Hilary said, laughing.
“Yeah, I don’t know how technically accurate we were,” Rob admitted. I went on to say that when David Schwimmer’s botanical character interacted with a sinister spore-birthed bulb for the first time in the initial Stay Out of the Basement episodes, I recognized how it was modeled after Rafflesia, the stinking corpse lily of Southeast Asia, a parasitic giant flower that feeds solely on other plants. Or in the case of Goosebumps: The Vanishing , Ross Geller from Friends .
“That’s probably what it is, by the way,” Rob said, chuckling. “I know we took it from a real-world flower.” “We had all those meetings with Weta, who did the VFX, with all sorts of weird plants from all over the world,” Hilary added.
“Really cool stuff I’d never seen before. Then we were like, oh, we actually have a job to do, after we looked at plants for two hours. We could have used your expertise!” It seems I should have let Rob and Hilary know about.
