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When it comes to upsetting things living in—and coming out of—your body, Ridley Scott’s original Alien remains the gold standard. But the new season of Goosebumps may be giving that film a run for its money. At the Goosebumps panel at New York Comic Con 2024, co-creator Rob Letterman and showrunner Hillary Winston released a number of clips. In one Schwimmer, who plays the botanist Anthony, is asleep in his lap when a tendril coming from under the bandages on his arm slowly stretches towards his face, creeping up his nose. (To be clear, it’s going to get a lot worse from here.)

Waking up, he rips off the bandages to realize he has in fact many such tendrils growing out of his forearm, each of them seeming intelligent and independent. Pulling on the tendril does not dislodge it, no matter how far he pulls it out. And eventually Anthony comes to the conclusion that they’re part of something bigger that is growing inside his arm and he grabs a knife and cuts into his arm and black goo pours out followed by something else that is much bigger and freakish and once you see this you cannot unsee it.

Throughout the scene the audience was filled with gasps and screams (and me going “Oh my God,” honestly). Afterward host Damien Holbrook asked whether this was the most disturbing thing Schwimmer had to do on the show. Looking at Letterman and Winston, Schwimmer smiled in a way that suggested it most certainly is not.

 “It’s kind of a dream job for all of us as actors to do a scene like that,” he said, noting that every actor on the show gets to do something of that same level of horror. “Because none of that is there when you’re shooting.  You’re tapping into that childlike wonder and that simple ‘What if?’ You have to use your imagination and try to do the best you can and hope the visual effects team will make it work. And how great are they?” he asked, to big applause.

You can find out just how great (and disturbed) they are on January 10th, 2025 when Goosebumps: The Vanishing begins on Disney+.

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