The Fear Street trilogy was one of the many casualties of the cinema-shuttering Covid pandemic, originally scheduled for an ambitious one-film-a-month summer release by Fox before being offloaded to Netflix. But while it was a little disappointing to see horror films made with such unusual cinematic flair released straight-to-smartphone, it was also a wise business decision, the unorthodox original strategy unlikely to have paid off.
Based on the series of books by teen favourite RL Stine, the three films set up an exciting, expansive world, shifting between the 1660s to the 1970s to the 1990s, gliding from teen slasher to queer romance to supernatural fantasy and within a genre that typically fails to win critics over, they were surprise successes (each boasts a Rotten Tomatoes rating over 80%). It was a rousing win for writer-director Leigh Janiak, whose steady tonal balance of serious and silly showed so many others how it can and should be done, and it opened up a new universe of potentially interconnected horrors for Netflix, the first of which lands this week.
