Coming Soon: Fear Street: A Film Trilogy

I grew up with R.L. Stine books. The Fear Street series began in 1989 and was followed by the Goosebumps series in 1992. I was a young horror fan who was reading a book a day by the time I was in second grade. My school also realized I was an advanced reader, so to save some of the Goosebumps books for the rest of the class, I was handed my first Fear Street title. I loved it so much.

When I tell you I read every R.L. Stine book for about a decade, I’m not exaggerating. I read all the Fear Street novels and special events. I’m talking everything from The Cataluna Chronicles to Fear Street Seniors being permanently etched into my memory, rattling around my brain to make connections between media I haven’t interacted with since the 90s. While the books had a formula to their structure, Stine was not afraid to experiment with setting, tone, theme, and what caused the horror.

One of the standouts for me was Fear Street Sagas. This dealt with the history of Fear Street. It provided a chronology for the cursed town, exploring how the Fear family came to befall so many misfortunes. Perhaps my favorite aspect of this was the lack of closure. Sure, there are reasons why the Fear family became hated. There are reasons why the land they owned, their homes, their street became haunted. But the ultimate source of all this evil and cruelty is never revealed. I’m not saying R.L. Stine was the biggest influence on my own writing, but I am saying that reading, rough estimate, 240 or so novels and short story collections from an author who often chose to solve a horror scenario without fully revealing its cause does leave an impact.

I don’t know how I only just found out about Netflix’s upcoming Fear Street film trilogy. Sure, I’m not the target demographic for a YA book to film adaptation, but this was my childhood. How had I missed all the press releases so far? No matter. I know now.

The trilogy is going to release one film a week starting on 2 July. Each film is set in a different year: 1994, 1978, and 1666. These are fully intended to be teen horror films built around the Fear Street series and I’m here for it.

That was always the point of the series. R.L. Stine found his niche in writing Middle Grade and YA fiction. I talk a big game about all the horror I grew up watching and reading, but there genuinely were a lot of books I didn’t fully understand. That wasn’t a problem with Fear Street because the series was written for younger readers.

The horror was intense, but the themes and circumstances came from a world younger people could understand. A bad day in school could lead to murder. A stupid choice when you broke the rules could have disastrous consequences. Taking that big risk you were worried about could be a bad choice. In some small way, good always triumphed. That doesn’t mean your favorite survivor from one book didn’t become the victim in another, but there was always some semblance of hope.

I’m curious to see how this approach translates onscreen, especially with the backwards chronology. The further back in history Stine went, the more extreme the circumstances became. 1666 could wind up as unsettling as The Conqueror Worm based on the historical Fear Street novels we know. My honest guess is the distance from the present made it okay for Stine to go further with his ideas. He couldn’t do a contemporary story with a character just casually being killed in a vat of boiling water, but he could get away with it when writing in historical periods we were taught were more dangerous.

Fear Street: Part 1: 1994 premieres on Netflix on 2 July. Part 2: 1978 premieres on 9 July. Part 3: 1666 premieres on 16 July.