FEAR STREET
WALK ON THE SHADYSIDE
IT’S A SCREAM, BABY! AS RL STINE’S FEAR STR E E T NOVELS GET THE NETFLIX TREATMENT, WE TALK TO DIRECTOR LEIGH JANIAK ABOUT NOSTALGIA, ’90S SLASHERS AND POINT HORROR
WORDS: JOSH WINNING
IF YOU WERE A HORROR KID IN THE ’90S, your shelves were probably dominated by one name: RL Stine. Often described as “Stephen King for kids”, the prolific author has spent the past four decades churning out chillers at a terrifying rate, penning over 60 Goosebumps titles, nearly two dozen Point Horrors and, in the US, over 50 instalments of teen horror series Fear Street.
The latter, set in the fictional Ohio town of Shadyside, featured a cast of beautiful teenagers getting killed in humorous and imaginative ways. Unlike Point Horror, the series only belatedly made it to UK shores, but it’s arriving in film form this month courtesy of a nostalgia-soaked Netflix movie trilogy overseen by director Leigh Janiak. A super-fan whose own horror credentials include the Scream TV series, Janiak leapt at the chance to usher Stine’s stories to the screen.
“Fear Street definitely hit my sweet spot,” she tells SFX of her history with the books. “I was a teenager in the mid-’90s and I grew up in a suburban town just outside of Cleveland, so I’m from Ohio, which is where Shadyside is. I was a horror fan from the time I was young, and I grew up watching slasher movies and having seances in my basement during sleepovers. I don’t remember the first Fear Street I read, but I loved all of them, and I never thought in a million years, ‘Oh, one day I’ll grow up and make these into a movie’.”