Netflix’s Street of Fear Trilogy may not be based on any R.L. stine’s best-selling book series of the same name, but according to the author himself, the creative team involved has captured the essence of them: each film is set in a different year (1994, 1978, and 1666), each follows a different scenario of protagonists, and each takes place within the same larger geographic region of shadyside.
“Scary Street started because we were trying to figure out how to make a series of horror novels.” stine tells syfy wire. “Most shows have the same characters book after book and you really can’t do that. It would be ridiculous to have the same two people and have all these horrible things happen to them.”
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The film trilogy, which premiered its final entry last week, has Stine’s stamp of approval. “They didn’t really use much of the books, but they got the spirit.”
However, one key thing that the films keep intact is the involvement of the Fier and Goode families, who have a strong presence in the series of street scare sagas. while sarah fier doesn’t feature prominently in stine’s books, she does play a major role in the movies, and her curse on shadyside continues to the “present” in 1994, despite being murdered in the 20th century. xvii. Meanwhile, Sheriff Nick Goode is another descendant of the town’s founders trying to fight the evils of Shadyside.
“We knew from the beginning we wanted to do a family rivalry,” Stine says of his approach to the books, which saw the fiers (who would eventually change the spelling of their last name to “fear” and thus go to have a street named for them) they take on the good guys in most installments of that series. “We wanted the Fier family and the Goode family to be eternally cursed and always fighting each other and always being bad luck to each other.”
Although some aspects of the good-good relationship may have changed when the series jumped from the page to the screen, another aspect of the fear street books does make it to the movies. As a whole, the trilogy has a relatively happy ending for a horror movie, something Stine says he himself learned the hard way when he wrote and published Best Friend, which sees its protagonist wind up in prison while the killer walks free.
“The one time I did an unhappy ending, [readers] hated it. They turned on me,” Stine recalls. “It followed me everywhere, and I actually wrote a sequel to give it a happy ending. It had to have a happy ending, and that’s a big deal in Fear Street.”
stine experienced the importance of that particular trait firsthand when he spoke with a child psychologist years ago, when street scare novels were still being published monthly. “This patient would come to see her every week and she would just recite scary street plots to him. And it was a way of dealing with her fears.”
Of course, stine no longer writes scary street books, focusing primarily on Goosebumps Now, a series he’s been writing for nearly 30 years, scaring generations of kids and their friends with everything from a doll to evil ventriloquist brought to life (slappy), or as seen in his latest release: fifth grade zombies. Part of this is because she has exhausted every argument she could think of when it comes to killing fictional teenagers, and even turned a fictional version of her own son into a vampire at the end of one particular book. /p>
but what scares children and adolescents has changed so much? after all, even the most recent scare street is still set in the 90s. according to stine, it’s not that today’s youth aren’t scarred in the same way that kids were in the 90s. instead, it’s a matter of technology .
“Cell phones have ruined all the mystery plots. That’s the only thing that’s changed,” says stine. “I have to get rid of the cell phones very early in the book or you don’t have a story. In the scary street book, the wrong number, the girls get scary phone calls. Now, she just stares at the front of her phone. she knows who she is and the book is over.”
While writing horror for younger readers hasn’t changed much, the publishing industry has evolved a lot over the years, especially with the push for more representation in children’s books and the young adult genre.
See Also: 12 Force and Motion Picture Books to Engage Young Learners
“I want to scare everyone,” says stine of his approach. “The thing about my books is that there’s very little characterization. They’re all completely plot-driven. They’re about what happens next. That’s it. And in a book that gives you goosebumps, I barely describe the characters. characters because I want readers to identify with the protagonist.”
he continues, “They’re all first-person and everything is seen through the eyes of the protagonist. I want the reader to imagine themselves as that person. So I don’t do much characterization at all.”
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stine has seen and enjoyed all three scary street movies, but doesn’t really watch or read much horror when he’s not working creating his own, preferring to dive into a good harlan coben or michael connelly thriller, having just finished and I love the law of innocence. And like many other pop culture fans, he enjoyed Bridgerton and the Greedy, and is currently stuck on Loki.
“i like the kind of horror movies that are witty and funny at the same time. they’re not just horror. i like scream movies. they’re on another level, [more] satirical [and ] meta. i really admired those movies . and Cabin in the Woods. That movie starts with teenagers trapped in a cabin, and it turns out to be something else entirely. I love it,” says Stine.
“I’m not that into horror,” he admits.
The latest novel to give you goosebumps, Fifth Grade Zombies, is out now. All three scary street movies are streaming on netflix.
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