Fear Street Director Leigh Janiak Wants To Make An MCU-Style Horror Universe

Fear Street director Leigh Janiak has spoken about her plans for more movies in the Netflix horror movie series. The three-part series, based on RL Stein's hugely popular Young Adult horror series, hit Netflix this month.

Speaking to IndieWire, Janiak explained that the amount of source material meant an MCU-style cinematic universe was a possibility. "One of the exciting things about Fear Street is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space," she said. "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."

Janiak went to talk about the unusual release schedule of the fear Street movies--one feature-length film released every week for three weeks--and how it gave her lots of scope for potential movies or shows. "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," she said.

"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. 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."

The three Fear Street movies are titled Fear Street Part 1: 1994, Part 2: 1978, and Part 3: 1666. They tell the story of the cursed town of Shadyside and the evil witch Sarah Fier across the course of three centuries. Stein's first Fear Street book, The New Girl, was published in 1989. It was followed by 50 follow-up novels, plus several spin-off series. It stands as one of the best selling young adult book series of all time.