It’s 2019 and it’s about time that the seminal R.L. Stine’s teen horror series, Fear Street, received the proper respect that it rightly deserves in the horror community. Especially when it comes to the teen horror sub-genre.
Beginning in June 1989 with The New Girl, Fear Street became a hot commodity among spook starved teens like myself. The books were like currency in the school hallways, joining the ranks of teen serials like Sweet Valley High, Christopher Pike novels, The Baby-Sitters Club, to name a few. So it bewilders me when a die-hard, horror fan says they have never heard of them. Or when a reputable horror site labels the series as “lesser known” while covering the upcoming Fear Street trilogy of films, because it seems like 90s horror fans who grew up on The Craft and Scream would’ve inhaled R.L. Stine’s anthology of killer boyfriends, wicked stepsisters, and sexy teen vampires just as much they would a Stephen King novel or Stine’s other gift to horrordom, Goosebumps. In fact, it’s almost impossible to not know of, or be familiar with, Fear Street if one knew of/read L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle series (yes they were published in the 90s, a decade before each respective TV series premiered), or even owned copies of Scholastic’s Point Horror novels, some that Stine himself wrote (most notably The Baby-Sitter and Halloween Night series of books). Fear Street is just as, if not more than, influential as the teen series I listed, along with Stine’s championed Goosebumps franchise.
For those (again, surprisingly) not in the know, Fear Street takes place in Shadyside, Ohio, and around the eponymous street named after the cursed Fier Family, who later changed the spelling of their last name to “Fear” in order to escape said bad juju. It didn’t work obviously, because the teen denizens are still paying for the sins of the Fears through various means, while residing on a street that seems to go on forever with frequent vacancies along the way. Fear Street contains a cemetery, a lake, an island in the middle of said lake, and woods surrounding the lake. Also there’s the Fear Family house that serves as the eyesore of the street, having been burned decades ago, but barely remodeled. While most of the stories took place in or around Fear Street, the supernatural and chilling events also affected many denizens from every corner of Shadyside’s city limits. In other words, Fear Street was basically the town’s Elm Street to the point even Freddy Krueger himself would be amazed.
From the devious antics of possessed cheerleaders and sports cars to even cliched haunted houses and carnivals, the horrors of Fear Street were akin to the slashers/horror films that laced the multiplexes in the 80s. The various Fear Street protagonists would’ve easily have fit in with the victims of Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street as they fit the many stereotypes that permeate each entry of those beloved 80s horror classics. The series even have their own cache of final girls with the likes of Corky Corcoran (The Fear Street Cheerleaders saga), Reva Dalby (Silent Night trilogy), and Kody Fraiser (99 Fear Street: The House of Evil) being memorable heroines along the likes of Nancy Thompson, Laurie Strode, or Sidney Prescott. Each girl came back to fight their respective supernatural nemesis in more than one entry, Corky being the most battle-ridden with four titles under her belt.
So with a cache of final girls, an even higher body count that rises with each novel, and supernatural adversaries who would easily get Freddy or Jason’s stamp of approval, why isn’t Fear Street championed within the horror community alongside Stine’s other popular brainchild Goosebumps? Maybe Shadyside’s high (and highly bloody) body count has a lot to do with it. The many deaths in Fear Street were numerous, and gruesome. Broken necks. Melting faces. Torn limbs. Impaled abdomens. The teens of Shadyside met their maker in ways that would be “unbecoming” of a Goosebumps tale, which would take a more tongue-in-cheek, yet perfectly ‘safe,” approach at the expense of the juvenile protagonists. Fear Street showed no mercy to its victims. Dead was dead, and there was nothing funny about it.
Goosebumps was basically “kid-friendly” in not only the stories, but merchandise as well. While Fear Street also had calendars, bookmarks, posters, and such to promote the series outside of the books, what it didn’t have was a television series to catapult it into the global atmosphere. I personally feel that if Fear Street had its own TV series or movie adaptation during the mid 90s, it would have matched Goosebumps‘ success, if not come close to it. What the Goosebumps TV series did was become a gateway for plenty of horror fans to the joys of reading, especially kids who found the pastime hella boring. Some would say Goosebumps also probably led them into Scholastic’s other top character, Harry Potter, making them lifelong readers in the process.
Fear Street also led reluctant teens to read as well, mainly due to their eye-catching covers. Even though Goosebumps had a TV series to help market its books, it’s still hard to grasp that a Fear Street book cover didn’t grasp a budding horror fan’s eye when entering a bookstore or the book section of a department store. These covers, drawn by Bill Schmidt, are horror gold. My fave cover is for Fear Street Cheerleaders: The First Evil, featuring a possessed, Shadyside High Cheerleader holding a pom-pom with a skeleton peeking through it. From the bloody fonts to the glassy-white eyes on the cheerleader, The First Evil is the best damn Fear Street cover of all time, because 1) you can easily see this cover as the poster for an obscure 80s horror movie sitting on the horror shelf of an old video store, and 2) is the best indicator of what Fear Street had to offer. The cover is simply iconic, worthy of not only a t-shirt I’m willing to shell money for. It’s a shame that no one has thought to capitalize off of those, but I digress.
2020 will bring us not one, not two, but three damn highly overdue Fear Street movies, which will hopefully pump new (and renewed) interest into the franchise. To say that I’m beyond ecstatic is an understatement, because its about time that Fear Street gets its due for staying in the game while other teen series from its era have fallen off. In 2005, it returned briefly for another three part miniseries titled Fear Street Nights that came and went without much fanfare. Then in 2014, Stine returned with a slew of new Fear Street titles that are longer and thicker than their predecessors’ mass paperback size. The latest books are released under the moniker “Return to Fear Street” that feature retro style cover art, mimicking the creased and well worn covers possibly found in garage sales and used book stores across the world. With the three Fear Street movies (all set in different time periods, with the most recent being 1994) dropping next year, here’s hoping the franchise will pool over into TV and other mediums that it couldn’t break into during the 90s.
Fear Street isn’t some dated fad that’s trying to claw its way back into the horror community’s conscious. It never truly went away, and fans, like myself, have never truly left its nightmare inducing neighborhood. It inspired similar series (Nightmare Hall, Spooksville, Phantom Valley, to name a few), made R. L. Stine a household name before the advent of Goosebumps, and shows no sign of ever being buried. So let’s not act like Fear Street and the denizens of Shadyside haven’t been in the game for a minute now.
Anyone else have any favorite Fear Street stories? Are you thrilled for the new movies dropping next year?
All pictures are courtesy of Simon & Shuster, Parachute Press, Harper Teen and HarperCollins Publishers.