Can Netflix tap into a new generation of R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike fans with new adaptations?
If you were a teenager in the 90s, theres a strong chance at least one inconsequential plot line from a teen horror novel is still taking up space in your brain. For instance, Andrea Subissati, the executive editor of Rue Morgue, Canadas horror in culture and entertainment magazine, recalls a specific moment from R.L. Stines Silent Night where a girl begins to apply lipstick only to find somebody has pushed a needle into her makeup. That moment stuck with her for decades  Every time I put lipstick on!  If you close your eyes, you can probably still smell the musty paper as you ruffle the pages, feel the cheap ink smear under your thumb and recall the lurid titles in slasher fonts, dashed across the covers featuring women in various stages of terror. Fear Street fan Jessica Guess started reading the books when she was 14 in the early 2000s. She also vividly recalls the lipstick episode  That one was really scary.  but for her, the covers were the big draw. They have almost a pulpy kind of feel to them, recalls the south Florida-based author and English professor who also runs the Black Girls Guide to Horror blog. The girls are always frozen in horror  Someones always about to stab someone or someones about to fall out a window.  Guess and Subissati are the exact group of readers with sticky memories for scary scenes that Netflix is counting on as it gets set to adapt books by Stine and Christopher Pike, the two crown princes of teen horror who dominated libraries and bookshelves in the 90s. Stines Fear Street books are being adapted into a trilogy of movies to be released once a week over three weeks starting July 2. Set in fictional Shadyside, Ohio, an otherwise sleepy town with a cursed street, the first film is centred in the self-aware mall culture of 1994. Part two takes place at a summer camp in 1978, while the third transports viewers all the way back to 1666, to the beginning of that curse. The Pike series, meanwhile, is based on the book The Midnight Club, which features a group of terminally ill teens at a hospice who gather together to tell scary stories, confront their fear of dying and make a pact to reach out from beyond the grave. In the various trailers released for the Fear Street trilogy, youll find references overt and subtle to Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween and Friday the 13th. Some of the stars include actors from Netflixs nostalgia-heavy hit Stranger Things.  Meanwhile, The Midnight Club shares some similarities with pre-teen horror anthology series Are You Afraid of the Dark? and stars Heather Langenkamp, who girled her way through various Freddy Krueger movies. All these references to your favourite scary movies and spooky shows arent by accident. Subissati notes that nostalgia horror is having a huge moment during the pandemic. People are reaching back for comforts sake and I think the revival of Fear Street kind of ties into that. People want their spooks, but they also want the safety of being a teenager curled up with those fuzzy, mouldy books!  For Guess, putting that comfort up against the unease of horror helps readers or viewers to keep moving forward in the story even if you might want to stop.  But if Netflix hopes to move forward with more viewers than just those who were fans of the books, if it wants Gen-X, Millennials and Gen Z, then nostalgia alone wont cut it. Theyre kind of having to satisfy three different generations who all have very different values and expectations, said Guess. And that is a big problem with those books; they were not diverse, they were not very inclusive, most times the girls were in the victim seat  so updating some of those tropes is a big job.  Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...  Its a task Guess takes personally. Shes excited to see the adaptations not just because she loved the books, but because they inspired her to write her own novella  Cirque Berserk, published in 2020. The book shifts between the 80s, 90s and 2000s, following various groups of teens as they visit an abandoned, potentially haunted carnival. She says she wanted it to feel like a Fear Street novel with chapter-ending cliffhangers, ulterior motives, characters who arent what they seem and a healthy dose of teenage drama. But I also wanted there to be a little more danger, have a little more blood, because Fear Street, as great as it was, was very much for teenagers. (Stine) kind of pulled back when he could have gone forward with certain things.  Guesss characters also have a sense of horror literacy that will be familiar to most modern fans of the genre. Im sorry Im not as excited as you are to be a horror movie trope, says Rochelle, a character in Cirque Berserk who appears reluctant to join in on the trip. My least favourite horror trope, in fact: dumb teens go somewhere they shouldnt.  Dumb teens going somewhere or doing something they shouldnt is the problem with Fear Street books in a nutshell. Revisiting the novels as an adult, they dont quite stand up to the scrutiny of modern sensibilities. The plots are convoluted, the characters one-dimensional and theres less gore than what youd find on, say, the average episode of The Walking Dead.  I do remember being able to sniff out the mystery a mile away, said Subissati. They drew from teenage slasher tropes of the 80s, which I find very formulaic.  But because horror has evolved and conversations around inclusion and representation have advanced in the genre, potential viewers seem cautiously optimistic that the movies, all of which will be directed by Leigh Janiak, arent just going to be carbon copies of what came before. The bar has been raised; horror has been taken seriously not just for its content but for its relevance as a reflection of society, said Subissati. Guess says horror fans who love the genre have always known it can tell deeper, human stories. Now a wider audience is seeing that.  The surge in popularity means a greater demand for content, which she suggests has forced those making decisions about who gets published and what gets made to look beyond the traditional kinds of horror, resulting in directors like Ari Aster, Jennifer Kent and Jordan Peele breaking through in a big way with movies like Hereditary, Midsommar, The Babadook and Get Out.  Those movies, she said, use horror to talk about real things weve all gone through.  A lot of Black people I know who really dont even do horror went to see Get Out. And not just because it was a story with a Black person in it, but also because they could point to it and say, Thats how I feel sometimes!   The Fear Street movies may not take a seat at the table of serious horror, but as Guess points out, not everything has to be serious to be successful. She hopes the adaptations draw in younger people, Gen Z and whoever comes after, to not only watch those movies but pick up those books and see what theyre about, maybe gain an appreciation for them because theyre very interesting.  Or maybe they, like her, will become writers themselves, crafting their own novels or screenplays and becoming the next generation of diversity in horror. I think its just up to those people in power to look beyond the obvious and look for more indie people, for more diverse voices.  Read more about: