It’s not uncommon for Hollywood to stake a bet on a trilogy, or to even film several sequels at once. But it’s downright unheard of to release the entire thing in three consecutive weeks.
Yet unlike a traditional studio, that’s a gamble Netflix is able to take with director Leigh Janiak’s “Fear Street” films, three features based on R.L. Stine’s popular teenager slasher series. The first of which, “Fear Street Part 1: 1994,” about the strange happenings in the cursed town of Shadyside, Ohio, debuted last week. This Friday, they go back in time even further, to 1978, and next Friday it rewinds all the way back to 1666. Some of the cast even appear in multiple films. The ambitious series takes on the roots of systemic oppression tied to this small town.
“I was personally obsessed with this idea of cycles of time, and history repeating itself and generational trauma. I was also a big fan of ‘Quantum Leap’ and ‘Back to the Future’ and I thought there was something that would be cool and satisfying to see characters who had experienced their own terrible events in the ’90s, in the ’70s and bring them back to the 1600s where their ancestors, or however you want to interpret it, experience something similar,” Janiak said. “What we ultimately ended up coming up was a hybrid of movies and what people think of more traditional television.”
“We found really exciting and great success when we leaned into YA romance, a category that I loved growing up with John Hughes. It became really clear that’s a rich space for us,” said Lisa Nishimura, Netflix’s vice president of independent and documentary films. “We started to look at horror, which is just a classic storytelling arena. What Leigh has done with ‘Fear Street’ is taken that ambition and combined a lot of the best in storytelling. She’s modernized it through a lens of who gets to fall in love, who is represented on screen, who survives the first 15 minutes? If you look back at the history of horror movies, it tends to be the outsider. She’s re-defined what that looks like and feels like. And she’s done it in a way that’s remarkably fun.”
