Casting and Plot Info for R.L. Stine's FEAR STREET Trilogy
Fear Street was the R.L. Stine series the cool kids read in upper elementary school. (Actually, I think it was a boy/girl split in my fourth grade class, because Brett and Anthony both read Goosebumps, and they were at opposite ends of the cool/dork spectrum, but I don’t think any of the girls did. (This is not to denigrate Anthony. I ran into him a couple years ago and he is FINE.)) Now that we are done with that extended and unnecessary parenthetical, like Goosebumps, Fear Street was a horror series from R.L. Stine, but it was more YA oriented. I read a LOT of them, and they were all about some teenage girl at Shadyside High School being stalked by a psychopath or sometimes a ghost. There are a couple books with vampires in them, too, I think. And one in which the hero is stalked by cats. My favorite was the 99 Fear Street trilogy, featuring a pretty normal haunted house, except that in the first book, the house attacks the inhabitants, and in the third book they are making a movie about the events of the first book, so all of the exact same things happen, only to the actors over the course of production. It is the most inventive/laziest way to write a trilogy in history. (The second book features a hot guy and a very good blow dart scene.)
Huh. You could have skipped that entire paragraph. Anyway, the Fear Street books were revived a few years back, and then a movie trilogy was announced about 18 months ago, but we haven’t heard much since then. Well, now we know a little bit about the directors, the plot, and a couple members of the cast. Leigh Janiak will direct the first and third films, and Alex Ross Perry will direct the second (watch the trailer for his upcoming film Her Smell here). Kiana Madeira (Really Me) and Olivia Welch (Agent Carter) will star in all three films, and we know a little bit about what that will involve. Collider reports:
“Madeira and Welch will each be playing gay teenagers trying to navigate their rocky relationship when they’re targeted by the crazy horrors of their small town, Shadyside. Each actress will be playing two different characters — one in the mid-’90s, and one in the 1600s, when gay women faced even greater adversity and repercussions — and they’re both slated to appear in all three films.”
That is both a bit more progressive than the Fear Street books from back in the day, and also the most Fear Street thing I could imagine. Like, in hindsight a lot of the books were pretty emo. Also, this sounds like it was taken from/inspired by the Fear Street saga, a trilogy that wove together different generations of the cursed Fier/Fear family (This is a good recap). There are witches and doomed romances and everything a teen girl could want.
I am not a huge horror fan, but I will probably check this out just out of nostalgia. What about you? Are you brave enough to venture back to Shadyside High?
Via: /Film