R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series

R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series is a new series airing on The Hub. Like the series Stine is most-well known for, it is a horror Genre Anthology series festuring a new story every week. A sneak preview of this show aired on Halloween, but the series didn't premiere until Christmas. Season 2 began on October 1, 2011 and shortly after its conclusion, Stine announced a third season had been ordered. The latest episodes can be view on the show website.

Continuity-wise, it's unrelated to the made-for-TV movie The Haunting Hour Don't Think About It.

"Bully Character: ''Looks like somebody grew a pair.""
 * Adaptation Decay/Adaptation Expansion: As many of the stories are based off short stories, this tends to happen a lot. Some stories are reasonably faithful, others only keep the title and basic concept. All The Dead Body has in common with the original short story is the idea of someone helping a young kid scare some bullies by pretending to be a dead body. In the original story, it's the kid's favorite uncle and the Twist Ending is that had died for real earlier that day. In the show, it's the ghost of a teenager who has been dead for years and is helping out the kid for his own nefarious purposes.
 * Adults Are Useless/Not Now, Kiddo: In "Really You" the mother is more concerned with the fact that there was a camera in her room as opposed to the fact that someone sneaked into her room and took the video card at some point. Inverted in "Creature Feature: Part 1"
 * Affectionate Parody: The film scenes in "Creature Feature" are these to 1950s sci-fi B-movies.
 * A God Am I: The titular protagonist of '"Swarmin' Norman'' becomes this when he realizes that he can control bugs.
 * Alien Among Us: Alien Candy.
 * And possibly the unseen octopus-like creature in Sick.
 * And I Must Scream: The fates of the protagonists in Pumpkinhead, The Dead Body, Mascot, and the alternate ending to Scarecrow.
 * Bad Humor Truck: In Catching Cold.
 * Be Careful What You Wish For: "Best Friends Forever" and "A Creature Was Stirring"
 * Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: In The Dead Body  turned out to be this when Will found out that
 * in Alien Candy, also turned out to be this when it's revealed that . However,
 * Body Horror: In the second part of the first episode, Lilly's slow, horrifying transformation into a doll.
 * Creature Feature had a pretty gruesome transformation into a tick-monster.
 * Book of Shadows: Used in Walls.
 * Car Fu: The ending to Really You Part 2.
 * Creepy Doll: Lilly D in "Really You."
 * Chekhov's Gun: The main character's silver necklace in "the Nightmare Inn" was given to her by her father specifically to ward off
 * Christmas Episode: "A Creature Was Stirring".
 * Cultural Cringe: Jessica doesn't like her bedroom in "Bad Feng Shui" then her traditional mother literally turns into a . Jessica must now use the Chinese Feng-Shui to help them out in her own room before her mother disappears...
 * Cruel Twist Ending: At least half of the episodes end in these.
 * "The Dead Body" ends with
 * "The Red Dress" ends with
 * "Ghostly Stare" ends with
 * "Game Over"ends with the main character
 * "Best Friend Forever" ends with
 * "Afraid of Clowns" ends with.
 * "Catching Cold" ends with.
 * "Mascot" has
 * The ending to "Scarecrow" beats all of the others by several orders of magnitude. Essentially, a girl buys a scarecrow from a stranger to rid her crops from a crow infestation. The end result:  And THAT'S the just the original ending! In an alternate ending,
 * "Headshot" combines this with Downer Ending:.
 * Darker and Edgier: It's considerably a bit more dark than Stine's earlier work Goosebumps.
 * Dark Fantasy: The two-part episode The Most Evil Sorcerer does a good job of capturing this feel. Magic users are capricious at best and outright evil at worst, the child protagonists are slaves in all but title, and Don't Go in The Woods is very good advice.
 * Defanged Horrors: The Klemit in the episode "Walls" and the zombie in "Best Friends Forever."
 * Deal With the Devil: Heavily implied in the episode "Headshot".
 * Deus Ex Machina: At the end of the Nightmare Inn
 * Actually...
 * Disproportionate Retribution: In Brush with Madness, a comic book artist gets fed up with a fan's questions and leaves off in a huff, leaving his brushes behind. He actually tries to return them, but before he can, the artist yells at him and accuses him of being an obsessive fan. Only then does the fan take the brushes and use them. So what does the artist do?
 * The Doll Episode: "Really You".
 * Earn Your Happy Ending: If an episode has a happy ending, chances are the main characters are going to have to go through hell to get it (cf. "Bad Feng Shui," "Flight," and "Creature Feature.")
 * Eldritch Abomination: The Stranger in Scarecrow just may qualify for this.
 * Episode On a Plane: "Flight"
 * Eye Scream: In "The Most Evil Sorcerer, Part 2," the sorceress performs a spell to pull out Ned's eyes and then places them in a jar.
 * Frying Pan of Doom: In "The Return of Lilly D",
 * The Game Come to Life: In Game Over.
 * Genre Anthology
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: from "Alien Candy":

"Nathan: Ooh! Right in the...
 * In the episode Wrong Number the old lady next door is referred to as "Beelze-bitch'' by the two mean girl protagonists.
 * In "The Walls," Jeffery's dad tells Jeffery that the Klemit (a sugar-addicted demon that lives in his bedroom wall) didn't kill the old man who lived in their house; it was the fact that the old man was 114 and had a 29-year-old girlfriend. Very rarely do May-December romances get referenced on children's shows these days (of course, with the line, "You do the math," it's probably implied that the old man died while having sex with his 29-year-old girlfriend or that the girlfriend murdered the old man just so she can have his money).
 * Creature Feature gives us this gem right after John, who was turned into a tick creature, was on the receiving end of a Groin Attack. The actual impact occurs off-screen, but the dialog makes it obvious what happened:

Lisa: In the what? Does he even still have any?

(John doubles over in pain)

Nathan: I'll take that as a yes."


 * Ghostly Chill: Inverted in Ghostly Stare, where the ghosts always complain that they are chillingly cold, even while they are possessing someone.
 * Go Mad From the Revelation: "Lights Out" ends with.
 * Halloween Episode: Pumpkinhead.
 * Hell Hotel: Subverted. The Nightmare Inn isn't awful
 * Here We Go Again:
 * Humanoid Abomination:The stranger definitely look human
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: In Creature Feature, the Mad Scientist is prone to these. The protagonist enjoys provoking them.
 * In Name Only: As of early season 2 none of the episodes are based on any story from the short collection "The Haunting Hour", but rather "The Nightmare Hour".
 * I'm a Humanitarian: The aliens in Alien Candy (with a rather Karmic Death and combined with I Ate What?)
 * The witch in "Stage Fright".
 * Karmic Twist Ending: In Wrong Number . Unlike the Cruel Twist Endings listed above, the main character of this episode totally deserved what happened to her.
 * "Swarmin' Norman," too. The main character is relentlessly picked on by a bully, so he later uses all his bugs to exact some deserved revenge. Fair enough, but
 * The Walls has an example as well.
 * Dreamcatcher: One girl at summer camp gets jealous of her friend befriending another girl. As a result leaves their cabin to sleep by herself out of spite. When the friend gets trapped by a dream lurking monster, said girl leaves the new friend to deal with it, pretends to come help in dreamland to help only to ditch the new friend out of spite, shows up when the rescue fails to gloat a bit and leave them to die at the hands of the spider creature,
 * Living Toy: Really You.
 * Loads and Loads of Characters
 * Monster Clown: A whole group of them in Afraid of Clowns,
 * Arguably subverted as
 * Multiple Endings: "Scarecrow," which had two premiere dates for them. Despite the second airing being advertised as a Directors Cut, both airings are the same up until the very end. The first ended with, while the second ended with.
 * Mind Screw: The Twist Ending of Sick is Up to Eleven in sheer mind-screwiness.
 * Mood Whiplash: "Scary Mary" ends up with a scary ghost face. cut to credits...with a upbeat pop song.
 * Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: The most eerie things happens in ordinary suburbs... No people take notice of our character's mayhem.
 * Nothing Is Scarier: The alien in the episode Sick is hardly seen in-view, that just makes it even more scary...
 * Our Monsters Are Weird: For starters, Big Yellow from Mascot..
 * Painful Transformation: The main character's transformation into a tick monster in Creature Feature Part 2.
 * Playing With Syringes: Dr. Sturgess in Light's Out was fond of this back when the asylum was open.
 * Also, Dr. Mangle in "Creature Feature".
 * Redheaded Hero: Walt in Alien Candy.
 * Recycled in Space: The episode of Pool Shark was basically Twilight as told from Jacob's POV (and if Jacob was a half-man, half-shark creature).
 * The series itself is Goosebumps if the stories were darker, more twisted, and a little less Narmy.
 * The episode "Headshot" is pretty much The Picture of Dorian Gray set in the world of teen magazine modeling.
 * The episode "Flight" is like The Sixth Sense, and with a Bittersweet Ending- with some Fridge Horror along the way- "Without a doubt."
 * Scary Scarecrows: In Scarecrow.
 * Sequel Episode: "Return of Lily D" is a sequel to "Really You". Word of God has confirmed a sequel to "The Dead Body"
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The basic plot of Black Mask.
 * Shout Out: During the bowling alley fight: FINISH HIM.
 * The Mascot has one for The Godfather when the protagonist wakes up and finds the head of the previous mascot's outfit.
 * Sick Episode: This one may come as a shocker, but "Sick"..
 * Sinister Surveillance: In "Really You" ,the older brother and his friend think this is what's happening when they try to rationalize the doll coming to life.
 * Something Completely Different: The Most Evil Sorcerer, in which the entire plot  takes place in Medieval Europe, as opposed to modern times.
 * Spared By the Adaptation: The original ending to Black Mask had the kids finding out too late that they were seeing the future and getting killed by the falling roof; the TV version had them alive and able to save the handyman who was about to die.
 * Spiritual Successor: To Goosebumps.
 * Tomato in The Mirror: Josh and Matt in "The Perfect Brother"
 * The Swarm: Swarmin' Norman.
 * The Un-Reveal: A few hints are laid about the identity of the Wicked Witch in Stage Fright. It turns out to be...
 * Trapped In Movie Land: Creature Feature.
 * Trying to Catch Me Fighting Dirty: The Tick Monster in Creature Feature.