The Fear Street Trilogy Is One of the Best Things Netflix Has Done
Five years ago, during lockdown, the streamer gave us a trio of weekly scares.
What's the best thing Netflix has ever made? You might point to some of their biggest shows, like Stranger Things or Bridgerton, or perhaps some of their most critically acclaimed films, like Roma or The Power of the Dog. There's a good case it's KPop Demon Hunters. All of those are defendable answers, but for three weeks during the early days of lockdown, the answer was unquestionably Fear Street, a trio of films based on Goosebumps author R. L. Stine's slightly more mature book series of the same name.
Fear Street Part One: 1994 hit Netflix on July 2, 2021 with the next two films, subtitled 1978 and 1666, coming out the following weeks. (Today is the fifth anniversary of the trilogy-capper.) Though vaccines had become widely available, the lockdown was very much ongoing and the rise of the Delta variant that put a damper on "Hot Vax Summer" and drove many back inside where they needed something to watch. Even though there were some new releases, especially when HBO Max started putting new Warner Bros. movies on streaming the same day as their theatrical release, there just weren't as many shiny new films to watch as the moment called for. Enter the Fear Streets.
Set in the perpetually unfortunate town of Shadyside, the first Fear Street was a throwback to '90s slasher movies — with a slightly, refreshingly modern sense of sexuality, since main characters Deena (Kiana Madeira) and Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) are ex-girlfriends and nobody in the small town seems especially scandalized by this. When Deena, Sam and their friends find themselves hunted by the resurrected masked murderers of Shadyside's bloody past, it sends them searching for the truth behind the town's curse. Part Two: 1978 is an homage to sleepaway camp slashers like Friday the 13th, and Sadie Sink stars as a survivor of one of Shadyside's previous murderous incidents. The final act, 1666, goes all the way back to the beginning, revealing the backstory of the so-called witch Sarah Fier who cursed the town in the Colonial Era. (It's like if The Crucible was a gruesome teenage murder romp.) A mid-film title card for 1994: Part 2 brings things back to Deena and Sam's time and concludes the whole story.
The Fear Street movies are not the highest levels of horror filmmaking. The craft is respectable rather than groundbreaking, and the movies are deliberately iterative of other horror titles (though they do distinguish themselves with the interconnective, decade-spanning narrative). What they are, though, are a ton of fun. Funny, self-aware, and boasting compelling characters and a few murders that are much gnarlier than you might expect, Fear Street feels like the sort of "better than it needs to be" film that Netflix can really knock out of the park when the streamer chooses to. (See: Carry On.)
It's worth noting how, amusingly, with these three movies Netflix did something the streamer is loath to do in almost any circumstance: weekly releases. Netflix is committed to the binge model to the possible detriment of their shows' longevity, considering how weekly series like Widow's Bay and The Pitt can build hype and an audience while the majority of Netflix shows are a flash in the pan that rarely have legs beyond the weekend all the episodes dropped. With Fear Street, Netflix gave horror fans something to be excited about for next week. Having them all get dumped on the same day would've been too much content. Had they come out a year apart, which is typically around the fastest that film sequels normally come out, it's almost assured some of the audience might have forgotten what they liked about Part One and never fired up Part Two. But weekly releases made Fear Street a horror event for the better part of a month.
The main characters from the Friday the 13th-inspired Fear Street Part Two: 1978.
There are some relics of lockdown that do not hold up when rewatched in less-viral times. The popularity of Tiger King, for instance, was clearly a sign of cooped-up madness rather than a reflection of that documentary series' quality. Fear Street still works. It's some of the most enjoyable original horror you'll find on the streamer to this day.
Despite the success of Fear Street, Netflix hasn't tried to replicate the formula. A fourth movie, Fear Street: Prom Queen, came out in 2025. Unlike the previous three films, this was a standalone movie nestled into the same Shadyside community, detailing a series of murders at Shadyside High School's 1988 prom. The lack of connections to an overarching storyline immediately make Prom Queen less exciting than the other movies, but the bigger issue is that Prom Queen is quite bad on its own terms as a slasher. If the other movies were clever homages to past eras of horror, Prom Queen is a dull, uninspired recitation of '80s tropes.
Prom Queen's failure does nothing to diminish the Fear Street trio's crown. The ever-prolific Stine wrote dozens of Fear Street novels. There's no shortage of source material should Netflix want to expand on what's quietly one of the streamer's best franchises. The lockdown might have made those first Fear Street films especially welcome, but they'd still be a special, scary-fun treat if they came out tomorrow.
