Netflix’s Fear Street 1994 is a thrilling, terrifying start to the streaming service’s trilogy of adaptations from RL Stine’s horror novel series of the same name, and the platform should make a TV series based on the books to capitalize on its success. Fear Street 1994 is a gory slasher horror that sees a group of small-town teens attempt to evade undead killers after accidentally disturbing the grave of a local witch. Dark, scary, and twisty, the movie does justice to the source novels while adding a brutal edge all of its own.
Despite being based on the work of Goosebumps creator RL Stine, Fear Street 1994 is definitively not for kids and features some terrifying moments of gore and horror. It is, however, similar in tone to the small-screen horror hits Slasher and American Horror Story, combining campy humor with serious scares and shocking gore to great effect. As a result, Netflix should take this opportunity to create a Fear Street television series once the movie trilogy finishes with the upcoming Fear Street 1978 and Fear Street 1666.
As proven by the (literally) hundreds of novels in his back catalog, Stine is one of horror’s most prolific writers, and his intensely '90s brand of silly-but-scary horror is perfectly suited to television adaptation. As such, there is a world of material for a Fear Street television series to explore after the trilogy wraps up its gory story. Now that the marketability of nostalgic horror series has been cemented by the outsized success of Stranger Things, the Fear Street books could be adapted into an anthology series that combines intense horror and a retro setting for a balance between scares, gore, and fun period detail.
A television series would give Netflix the ability to borrow from the Fear Street books and adapt certain storylines each season while still allowing a lot of flexibility. After all, the Fear Street trilogy has already made some radical departures from Stine’s source material. The trilogy is a sprawling, multi-generational story that spans centuries, whereas most of Stine’s Fear Street books are brief, punchy horror stories. Not only does this prove that Netflix is willing to rework Stine's writing, but the brevity of his books also makes them more suited to the anthology TV format than to movie adaptation.
By combining dark horror elements with campy humor like the critically-acclaimed horror anthology series Tales From the Crypt, a Fear Street television show could not only reignite interest in Stine’s uniquely ‘90s novels but also in the once-popular format of the anthology horror series. Thanks to the aforementioned likes of Slasher and American Horror Story, the genre has been undergoing something of a revival recently, but Fear Street could interest a new generation in the format by segueing from this ambitious multi-movie adaptation into a more self-contained anthology horror format. A Fear Street television series would be the perfect vehicle for Stine’s funny-but-frightening approach to self-contained horror stories, and the success of Fear Street 1994 makes it clear that there will be a market for such a show once the trilogy concludes.
