Fear Street: Leigh Janiak is ready to start expanding the Netflix franchise

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

I was impressed by the trilogy of Fear Street films that were released through the Netflix streaming service over the first three weekends of July, and they seem to have gone over well with a lot of other Netflix subscribers. Given the fact that author R.L. Stine has written over 100 books that have been published under the various Fear Street banners, it was clear from the start that this could be a major franchise, and the film trilogy's director Leigh Janiak discussed the franchise's potential during a conversation with IndieWire.

Janiak said, 

One of the exciting things about Fear Street is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space. One of the things that I talked about before I was hired was that we have a potential here to create a horror Marvel [Cinematic Universe], where you can have slasher killers from lots of different eras. You have the canon of our main mythology that’s built around the fact that the devil lives in Shadyside, so there’s also room for everything else. … I think that my hope is that audiences like it enough that we can start building out [more], we can think about what another trilogy would be, what stand-alones would be, what TV would be. I don’t even think about it like TV or movies exactly anymore. That’s the great thing about Netflix and about what Fear Street is, which is kind of a hybrid new thing. I’m excited about the possibility of what else can happen."

Janiak directed slashers that were set in 1994 and 1978 for the initial trilogy (and also told a story of witchcraft tearing a small village apart in 1666), and she already has an idea for the next era she would like to visit: 

I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie, which I haven’t really seen and what that means. It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan."

The idea of slasher movies set in decades when slasher movies weren't being made is one that really appeals to me as well. That's something I've been wanting to see explored for a while now. We got a taste of what a 1959 slasher could be like at the beginning of Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps, but then the rest of the movie jumped ahead to alien-zombie craziness in 1986. I look forward to seeing where the Fear Street franchise will go from here, and would love to see what Janiak could do with a slasher movie set entirely in the '50s.