Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is partly based on this R.L. Stine novel. The works of author R.L. Stine evokes a warm sense of nostalgia in readers of a certain age, with his Goosebumps series of children's novels helping many get into the horror genre. In addition to the almost endless number of Goosebumps books, the franchise also spawned a TV show during the '90s - with one Goosebumps episode featuring Ryan Gosling in an early role - some video games and even two movies starring Jack Black as Stine.
Goosebumps isn't Stine's only novel series, with some of his other popular franchises being Mostly Ghostly and The Nightmare Room. His Fear Street novel series began in 1989 with The New Girl, and the series and its assorted spin-offs have collectively sold over 80 million copies. Fear Street spawned a trilogy of Netflix movies in 2021. The first entry was Fear Street Part One: 1994, followed by Fear Street Part Two: 1978 and finally Fear Street Part Three: 1666. The sequels followed a week after each other and told an overarching story of a group of friends looking to undo a witch's curse that has plagued their town.
Each entry in the Fear Street movie trilogy harkened back to a particular subgenre. 1994 was a slasher in the vein of Scream, 1978 paid loving homage to summer camp horrors like Friday The 13th while 1666 was a folk horror in the same vein as The VVitch. The trilogy notably didn't directly adapt any particular R.L. Stine Fear Street book, instead taking the settings, themes and characters and remixing them together. That said, Fear Street Part Two: 1978 pulls the most inspiration from R.L. Stine's twelfth Fear Street novel Lights Out, as they both share Camp Nightwing setting.
What Fear Street Part Two Pulls From Lights Out
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 sees teen outcast Ziggy (Stranger Things' Sadie Sink) and her friends having to confront a killer possessed by the same curse that's afflicted their town for centuries. Fear Street Part Two: 1978 leaned hard into classic slasher movie tropes from Friday The 13th or the Sleepaway Camp movies, with the added twist of breaking an unspoken genre taboo and killing children. Fear Street Lights Out follows a counselor named Holly, who is forced to help her uncle at Camp Nightwing. There she has to face bullies, strange acts of vandalism and, when a counselor is gruesomely killed, a murder.
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is tonally similiar to Lights Out, though the specifics of the plots are very different. There's no Sarah Fier curse or extended passages set in underground tunnels in Stine's novel, and only one character actually dies. Holly, like Ziggy, has a bad time with demonic fellow counselors - including having a bucket of leeches thrown on her - but ultimately it was the setting and tone of the novel that Fear Street Part Two: 1978 drew from.