A sixteen-year-old named Jenny takes a babysitting job in a town where a prowler is going after girls her age, because she needs the money for a writing program. That is The Babysitter, the novel R.L. Stine published in 1989, and Tubi is turning it into a movie for 2027.
Jem Garrard wrote the script and executive produces. Trevor Calverley directs, and Blue Ice is the production company. Tubi announced the film on Sunday during an R.L. Stine panel at New York Comic Con, where chief content officer Adam Lewinson confirmed it, and the service put a short tease on its own YouTube channel.
Three Years Before Goosebumps
Scholastic published The Babysitter in 1989, three years before the first Goosebumps book, and it ran to four titles: The Babysitter II in 1991, III in 1993 and IV in 1995. Point Horror, Scholastic’s teen horror imprint, launched in 1991 and folded the original in retroactively. The title is twice-used on streaming already: Netflix released an unrelated horror comedy called The Babysitter in 2017 and a sequel, Killer Queen, in 2020.
In the novel, Jenny Jeffers sits for the Hagens, fields calls from a raspy voice she keeps to herself, and learns the caller is the father of the boy she is watching. Tubi’s logline keeps the calls and the prowler and adds a dangerous fugitive in the area, which widens the suspect pool well past the one Stine wrote. The book’s answer, that the danger was the man who hired her, is still the better idea.
Garrard Is the Through-Line
Garrard wrote and directed R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead, which premiered on Tubi in October 2025, and Pumpkinhead 2, which cast Cassandra Peterson as a witch named Cassandra and started streaming October 9 under Terror on Tubi. Garrard also wrote and directed R.L. Stine’s Afraid of Clowns, due next year, with Jimbo from RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars playing a ringmaster. On The Babysitter, Garrard writes and Calverley directs.
Those three films share a town called Redhaven. They also share a source: the two Pumpkinhead movies trace back to Stine’s The Haunting Hour, and Afraid of Clowns comes out of his 1999 collection Nightmare Hour. The Babysitter is the first in the partnership built on one of his novels, per The Hollywood Reporter, and nothing in the announcement puts it in Redhaven.
Pumpkinhead 2 is streaming on Tubi now. Jenny has not been cast.
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