Netflix’s new horror Fear Street 1994’s ‘90s teen horror earned strong reviews, Fear Street 1978 took the story back to the ‘70s for a gorier, darker second installment that continued to receive positive write-ups.
A summer camp-set slasher with a supernatural edge, Fear Street 1978 owes an obvious creative debt to the likes of Goosebumps writer RL Stine.
Stine was himself influenced by King and, in literary , the horror genre was dominated by the writer throughout the ‘80s. Thus, Stephen King earns a nod in Fear Street 1978 much like The Stand arriving soon after, it is fair to say that Fear Street 1978’s hero is right in noting that Stephen King was pretty massive by the time the campsite horror takes place. However, it is pretty ironic for this adaptation to feature a shout out to King as, not only was Stine later seen as a kid-friendly version of the writer, but King also never actually wrote a slasher story like Fear Street 1978 despite being at his peak throughout the ‘80s when the sub-genre dominated horror.
Fellow bestselling horror novelists like Richard Laymon, Christopher Pike, and even Stine himself churned out countless bestselling paperback slashers at the time, so it isn’t as if the slasher genre could not lend itself to literature. However, despite The Dark Half is not a million miles from a slasher, but it is more of a trippy meta-murder mystery and as such doesn’t really count, as its plot owes more to the then-emergent “psychological thriller” sub-genre than the traditional Fear Street 1978-style slasher.
That said, Fear Street 1978 may have name-dropped the author precisely because the movie wanted to avoid mentioning its more obvious inspirations. Having the characters talk about Friday the 13th Part 2 while evading a sack-masked serial killer in a summer camp could have been a bit too on-the-nose, particularly when the Fear Street series has thus far earned critical acclaim for largely eschewing the campy, self-referential humor of many recent slashers. Each villain-riddled Fear Street installment has featured authentically scary villains and shocking, brutal deaths where many critics expected a playful, self-aware adaptation of Stine’s writing, so limiting the character’s references to a period-appropriate best-selling author like Stephen King may have been part of the Fear Street trilogy’s attempt to subvert expectations and steer clear of characters smugly compared their predicament to a slasher movie.
