Return to Fear Street and R. L. Stine’s world of horrors

I was one of those kids at school who could always be found squeezed in between bookshelves at the school library during lunch hour. While my classmates wolfed down actual food in the cafeteria, I devoured the works of Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, JK Rowling, and the ghostwriters who penned the Nancy Drew series. It was here, amongst these very shelves that I first chanced upon the works of the one author who would pave the way to my fascination with the horror genre: RL Stine.

If I had to sum up RL Stine's works in a phrase, I'd call them "page-turners". Stine wrote his bestselling Goosebumps and Fear Street series keeping in mind a young audience, specifically pre-teens and teens, growing up in the 1990s. And right there lay his charm for those of us reading from the divide of the 2000s. Stine's works packed in the right amount of nostalgia and relatability required to appeal to us post-90s kids.

I still remember the feeling of reading my first ever Stine novel, Bad Dreams (Simon Pulse, 1994), from the Fear Street series. Bad Dreams revolves around its teen protagonist, Maggie Travers, who finds life to be complicated in her new house on Fear Street by unseen forces, just a few months after her father's untimely death. It wasn't the plot that drew me to it, but the style of writing. I didn't just feel like I was reading the book, I felt like I was in it. In just a few words and short sentences, Stine managed to relay to his readers the anxiety of moving to a new town, the warmth of a childhood friendship, and the stress of navigating life in middle school. Although these stories were deliberately kept simpler and more grounded than the socially conscious, layered narratives we're used to reading in young adult novels today, Stine's books directly reflected my life throughout elementary and middle school. The books I'd read prior to Goosebumps and Fear Street featured children acting like adults. Nancy Drew was always level-headed and rational, much like the Famous Five and the Secret Seven. They made for compelling characters, yes, but they didn't always resonate with me. The kids in those books didn't lose their minds preparing for school exams, nor did they trade lunches with their friends at school. Even their fights felt tame. In Stine's world, meanwhile, children didn't go about sleuthing with professional equipment; they geared up with flashlights, juice boxes, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Over the years, Stine has stated several times that he didn't intend to scare children with works of horror when he first began penning children's books. In an interview with NPR's Michael Martin, Stine spoke about his early start in writing at the age of nine: "I always wanted to be funny. I never planned to be scary", he said. Stine's first foray into the horror genre was at the suggestion of an editor, with the novel Blind Date (Scholastic Paperbacks, 1987) featuring the fictional account of an ill-fated man's blind date gone wrong. After the novel's significant amount of success, the Fear Street series was born, with the first novel The New Girl (Simon Pulse) releasing in 1989.

However, despite making the shift from comedy to horror, Stine continued to serve up helpings of both genres in his works. Stine has discussed this rather unconventional approach in children's books saying, "I don't really want to terrify kids. Whenever I have something that I think is kind of intense, I throw in something funny to lighten it up", he shared in an interview with Michel Martin from NPR.

Stine's books, being the "page-turners" that they are, have often been dismissed as just another bestselling addition to pulp fiction. As a Stine fan myself, I beg to differ. The wholesomeness that Stine incorporated into his works with a mix of spooky and fun made for more than just easily-digestible literature. They offered up a haven for children, a territory unique from the traditional YA genre and philosophical classics enjoyed by adults. Speaking to Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic, Stine recounted a conversation he'd once had with a child psychologist in LA. "He told me he had a patient, this girl, who came in every week, and all she did was recite Fear Street plots to him", Stine said, explaining that the psychologist eventually deduced that reading the books was quite possibly the patient's way of coping with her own fears.

It dawned on me as an adult that I'd probably done the same as a socially-awkward elementary school child, working through my anxieties as I read about shady campsites and murderous school events. Books in the original Fear Street series almost always narrated from the perspective of teens attending Shadyside High. From aggressive cheerleaders to the creeping loners to the vicious overachievers, the town of Shadyside had its fair share of skeletons in the closet, courtesy of Stine's sinister worldbuilding. Just about every chapter ended with some sense of foreboding regarding the town's mysterious history—Stine never failed to remind his audiences about how Shadyside, or more specifically the cursed Fear Street, is a place where bad things always come to pass. Its eeriness is palpable. Underneath the mystery of it all, lay simmering tensions arising from fractured relationships amongst the townsfolk. In the aforementioned Bad Dreams, Maggie attempts to work through her rocky relationship with her sister Andrea, while Tina from College Weekend (Simon & Schuster, 1995) tries to dismiss her growing paranoia about her boyfriend and his roommate's strange behaviour. There's also the cocky and overconfident Bobby Newkirk, who gets caught up in a nightmarish—and murderous—love triangle that he can't escape in Double Date (Simon Pulse, 1994). Stine's vision is clear: You can take the townsfolk out of Fear Street but you can't take Fear Street out of them.

The popularity of Stine's creations hasn't been limited to words on pages, of course. The most popular adaptations revolved around the bestselling Goosebumps series, consisting of the Canadian-American TV series Goosebumps (1995-1998), which aired on YTV and Fox Kids, and the commercially-successful Goosebumps (2015) film directed by Rob Letterman. Unfortunately, the adaptations of Stine's other works, namely The Haunting Hour: Chills in the Dead of Night (HarperCollins, 2002) and the Mostly Ghostly series (Delacorte Press, 2004-2006) failed to generate as much traction as the Goosebumps franchise. Even though the books in the Fear Street series had risen to the ranks of bestsellers, their adaptation, an unproduced Ghosts of Fear Street (1998) pilot for ABC Television, hardly met with success.

It appears now that the streaming service Netflix is attempting to restore the iconic Fear Street series to its former glory, with three film adaptations set in different time periods. The announcement came shortly after Stine himself breathed new life into the series with fresh new tales in 2014, with the release of Party Games (St Martin's Griffin, 2014). Each of the three films in Netflix's Fear Street trilogy will be period-horror with a promising premise much in-line with Stine's aesthetics and worldbuilding. Thrill-seeking teens? Check. Unexplained disappearances and deaths? Check. All of the above set in the mysterious town of Shadyside? Double check. Judging from the teaser trailers, it can be deduced that the trilogy will quite possibly focus on the curse of the fictional Fear Street in Shadyside, whilst exploring the origins of the street's original inhabitants: the Fier family. The teaser footage released by Netflix is seen to take inspiration from '80s and '90s slasher films, with Maya Hawke's appearance bearing similarities to Drew Barrymore's in Scream. Each film in the trilogy event is expected to carry its own weight in terms of storytelling, with each narrative being distinctly separate from the other despite being in the same universe.

As interesting as the trailer looks, one can't help but worry about the "slasher film'' approach, which has a reputation of being formulaic and just might risk losing sight of Stine's vision. The cast seems to largely feature television actors such as Sadie Sink, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Gillian Jacobs, Benjamin Flores Jr and many more. Sink has already proven herself to be a bankable star in the horror genre, having previously starred in Stranger Things. On the other hand, Gillian Jacobs' strongest suit is comedy. Unless Jacobs manages to truly display versatility in her acting, her performance might fall flat as one of the leads in Fear Street Part 2 (2021). Overall, the casting choices seem to focus more on lesser-known actors, some fresh faces, some veterans. This decision introduces the element of surprise since the audience aren't sure about what to expect. But considering how white actors seem to make up the bulk of the main cast for all three films, I guess we can eliminate hopes of seeing a more multicultural and diverse take on the Fear Street narrative.

Whether or not the trilogy will succeed in elevating the experience of fans of the Fear Street is what remains to be seen.

Rasha Jameel studies microbiology whilst pursuing her passion for writing. Reach her at rasha.jameel@outlook.com.

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