Cracking R.L. Stine: Leigh Janiak on Crafting The Fear Street Trilogy | Interviews

Right. That must have been terrifying.

Yeah. That was nerve-wracking. But I believed in the movies and the experience of the movies. Everyone was very excited about them. So, I knew ultimately, we would be fine. But it was worrying, like, “Oh no, what is going to happen? Am I going to have to—” I don’t even know. There’s no way to make these not R-rated.

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It was in early pandemic days where everything was up in the air in the industry, I would say. And there had already been discussions and talks with like, “What is the future of Fear Street at Disney?” And Netflix had been raising their hand since before we even had the green light. Netflix wanted to make these movies while we were still developing the scripts. It’s just Fox and Chernin controlled them at the time. So, when Netflix sensed that there was an opening here, they did not hesitate. And honestly, it was so amazing for me, my dream come true. Netflix knew what they needed to do to support the movies and to figure out like, “How are we going to do this new thing…” At Fox, we had never really cracked what is this actually going to be. How far apart is this going to be? And Netflix right away, it was like, “We could do this, we could do this, we could do this.” It was just very exciting.

The way the first the film ends, there’s a trailer for the next movie that plays immediately. Was that always part of the concept, or was that something that came to the table when Netflix signed on?

That was something that I had always included. That was something that I worked on with one of my editors, this guy named Hunter [Carter], who specializes in teaser trailers. And so, I thought that no matter what, whether or not the movies ended up being theatrical or they were streamed all together in one night or a week apart or whatever, it was important to have the, “Coming soon,” and, “Previously on,” [which kicks off the sequels]. It felt throwback-y to me and just fun and a good way to get hyped up for the next one. 

You mentioned there would be no way to recut these out of an R-rating. Why was the R-rating so important?

“Fear Street,” the books—if we were grading them or rating them—wouldn’t be R-rated necessarily. But when I was 14 or 15 picking up these books, they felt edgy. They felt like I was doing something subversive. That, to me, was important to preserve in the movies. 

Further than that, thinking about movies one and two, and—elements of movie three—these are slasher movies. There are great PG-13 horror movies, but to make a slasher movie, it has to be bloody. You have to kill people in a terrible way. It’s just so important to be baked into the DNA of what these movies were. That level of gore and violence, combined with the language of the teenagers and keeping it authentic to what I feel like is an authentic teenage experience, at least, was really, really important to me.

“Fear Street Part 1: 1994” premieres on Netflix on July 2. “Fear Street Part 2: 1978” premieres on Netflix on July 9. “Fear Street Part 3: 1666” premieres on Netflix on July 16. Be sure to come back after part three is released for more reveals about “Fear Street.”