Fear Street Director Wants Netflix Franchise to Become MCU of Horror

This month featured a fun and unique release schedule from Netflix, which gave us one Fear Street movie a week until the trilogy inspired by R. L. Stine’s beloved book series came to an end. The final installment, Fear Street: 1666, hit the streaming service this weekend and was well received, earning a 94% critics score and 84% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. ComicBook.com gave the third movie a 4 out of 5 and called it “an earned and inventive conclusion” to the story that began with Fear Street: 1994 and Fear Street: 1978. The new trilogy may be over, but director Leigh Janiak hopes to continue the story in a way that would mirror the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“One of the exciting things about ‘Fear Street’ is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space,” Janiak told IndieWire. “One of the things that I talked about before I was hired was that we have a potential here to create a horror Marvel [Cinematic Universe], where you can have slasher killers from lots of different eras. You have the canon of our main mythology that’s built around the fact that the devil lives in Shadyside, so there’s also room for everything else.”

“I think that my hope is that audiences like it enough that we can start building out [more], we can think about what another trilogy would be, what stand-alones would be, what TV would be,” Janiak continued. “I don’t even think about it like TV or movies exactly anymore. That’s the great thing about Netflix and about what ‘Fear Street’ is, which is kind of a hybrid new thing. I’m excited about the possibility of what else can happen.” She added, “I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie, which I haven’t really seen and what that means … It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan.”

“I had done horror movies but none quite like this,” Gillian Jacobs (Adult C. Berman) recently shared with ComicBook.com when asked about her interest in the project. “I also grew up reading R.L. Stine and Fear Street so I had that excitement and nostalgia for it and I also loved the idea that she was going to make all three of them at the same time, so she was going to be able to weave all the different kinds of stories in separate R.L. Stine books all in this one trilogy, which I thought was really smart and captured the essence of what I loved about the books as a kid.”

Fear Street Part 3: 1666 is now streaming on Netflix.