Exclusive: Fear Street Series Coming To Netflix
Our trusted and proven sources have told us that a Fear Street series is coming to Netflix and may focus on a very disturbing character.
Update January 2024: This Giant Freakin Robot exclusive was confirmed with R.L. Stine stating that a Fear Street movie was in development at Netflix.
The cinematic adaptation of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books was released as a three-part series of films on Netflix in July 2021 and immediately struck a nerve with audiences and critics. Perhaps it was due in part to the long drought between seasons of Stranger Things at the time, but the combination of creepy vibes, classic horror homage, and a cast of scrappy young adults was surprisingly popular. According to our trusted and proven sources, Netflix has taken note and decided there is no reason to let a sleeping intellectual property lie dormant. A new Fear Street series is in development at Netflix with original director Leigh Janiak involved in some capacity and likely will be announced soon.
R.L. Stine’s original Fear Street books actually predated his iconic Goosebumps series by two years, with the first installment published in 1989. Whereas the Goosebumps books have more of a vibe of “what if this lunchbox was actually haunted?” the Fear Street books typically involved more mature themes, including the origin of its setting of the town of Shadyside as being involved in long-ago witch burnings. The three-part Fear Street series of films on Netflix kept this tone intact, with graphic stabbing, genuinely disturbing monsters, and of course, Shadyside.
According to our sources, the Fear Street series was relatively inexpensive for Netflix, which has to be music to the ears of the increasingly embattled streaming platform. Netflix has recently had a series of public misfortunes, and no doubt a recognizable hit like Fear Street is full of potential (especially considering the 51 different books of potential source material in the original R.L. Stine series alone).
It also helps that the cast members of the Fear Street series of movies on Netflix were largely young and unknown and likely did not have the same sticker price as say, Dwayne Johnson or Ryan Reynolds. To be fair, a pretty big portion of the cast did not survive the movies, but the horror genre is never short on either new victims or unexpected resurrections. The most recognizable younger members of the Fear Street cast were actually ported over from another series beloved by Netflix, Stranger Things. Sadie Sink (Max in Hawkins, Indiana) starred in the second film, Fear Street 1978, while Maya Hawke appeared in the opening scene of the first movie as a suspiciously familiar mall employee.
Our sources indicate that a new Fear Street on Netflix will potentially deal with Billy Barker, one of the possessed murderers from the original movies. He first appeared in the finale of Fear Street 1978 and a newspaper clipping in Fear Street 1994 described him as a deformed child who bludgeoned his brothers to death with a baseball bat in 1922. Pretty gruesome stuff, but it is not called “Fear Street” for nothing. Well, technically it’s called that because a family changed their name from “Fier” to “Fear” to avoid bad luck in the worst possible way, but still. If there is a new Fear Street series on Netflix, that’s the kind of backstory we want to see explored.
