One of the more ambitious horror projects to come along in recent years, Netflix‘s three Fear Street movies were shot back-to-back by director Leigh Janiak, who played with different tones, styles, time periods, and subgenres throughout the trilogy. The story wrapped up in Fear Street Part 3: 1666, but there’s endless potential for the future of Fear Street. After all, there are countless teen horror novels from the R.L. Stine archives to pull from, and multiple different ways the already established storyline could be expanded upon by the creative team.
Is it possible that Netflix has a much larger franchise on their hands with Fear Street, beyond the trilogy? Leigh Janiak is hoping that’s the case, she explains to IndieWire.
“One of the exciting things about Fear Street is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space,” Janiak explains to IndieWire. “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.”
Janiak continues, “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.”
“I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie, which I haven’t really seen, and what that means,” Janiak adds “It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan.”
Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy ends with the suggestion that someone new has come into possession of the book that first unleashed Hell upon Shadyside back in the 1600s, teasing that the nightmare isn’t quite over just yet. And if the trilogy proves to be a smash hit success with Netflix’s subscribers, well, there’s a good chance we’ll be back in town before long.
Stay tuned…
