Beginning in 1995, R.L. Stine‘s mega popular Goosebumps stories began exploding onto the small screen, but the road to the big screen wasn’t as easy. Though attempts at film adaptations date back to the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2015 that the very first Goosebumps movie was finally unleashed into theaters, and a sequel of course followed earlier this year.

The earliest iteration of a feature adaptation was in the early-mid ’90s, when Tim Burton was on board to produce. Speaking with Cinema Blend, Stine reflects on that project.

“We had a movie deal to do a Goosebumps movie, and I can’t tell you what year it was,” Stine told the site. “It was like at the height of Goosebumps, back in ’94, ’95, around there, and we actually had a deal with Fox to do a movie, and Tim Burton who was going to be the producer. We had a big meeting, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be great. Tim Burton and Goosebumps. It’ll be great.’ And we had a nice meeting with him, and we had a great time and we talked about what we should do, and then nothing happened.”

Stine continued, “He got involved in some Superman project (Superman Lives, starring Nicolas Cage) that also never happened. He was going to do Superman, and then we never heard from him again. That was the end of it. I think we were going to do a new story, but use some of the elements. But we never got that far, you know? It’s very strange. I don’t know. People couldn’t figure out for a long time which story to do, what should we do. And then Goosebumps wasn’t as popular, and then it came back.”