Stine—traces the origins of an ancient evil that menaces the doomed suburb of Shadyside, a witch’s curse that turns out to be much more complicated than it seems. With Fear Street’s third part, set in 1666, now streaming, Slate talked to director Leigh Janiak, who had the massive task of directing and co-writing all three movies, about the horror favorites that inspired her, filling the genre’s blind spots, and why it was important that the movies be a lot gorier than the books.
And Peter Chernin had this idea that he wanted to release a trilogy all in one year.
From that place, me and my fellow writers, we sat down, we thought about what we would like to see, and tried to figure out a way that we could make the audience feel like they’re invested in these characters in a way that was organic and not just a trick of “Come back for the second movie.” It made sense that the first movie would take place in the ’90s, because that’s the present of the Fear Street books.
But without getting into the weeds … one of the ideas was “we’d like you to have a different director for the second movie so you can focus on post for movies one and three.” At that point we hired a very dear friend of mine, fellow filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, who I love.
Alex and I would joke when he was doing it that while he was going to be shooting that movie, I was going to be making a found-footage making-of that then became a horror movie.
Amid that, there were certainly days where it was like, “Oh, actually, we need to do this piece of ’94 here.” So there was overlap, but for the most part we were able to at least stick to the big chunks.
That was really a very, very appealing part of it for me, the ability to live in these different time periods, to send love letters to the kind of movies that I love from those eras, and keep them distinct.
He was the only composer that I spoke to, and I was so very lucky that he agreed to do it.
And then one of his mentors was actually Jerry Goldsmith, who did the original Omen and a million other great things.
You open the 1994 movie with an homage to the first Scream, where the daughter of a famous acting family is murdered by a killer with a knife and a skull mask.
I think that’s the cool thing about being a teenager and watching horror movies: You’re at that edge where you’re just starting to understand that you can die, but you still are infused with that invincibility.
Speaking of theaters, the new Conjuring was one of the first movies I’d seen in a theater in almost a year, and I was really taken aback by how hard all the loud jump scares hit me.
Are we mixing it too hot?” And then I realized it was just my brain and my ears wakening up again to “this is what a theater sounds like.” It’s so crazy.
Terrence Malick’s The New World was a big one for me, mostly because I felt tonally it was very interesting to see how he had the camera attached to character point of view in that movie.
You open the first movie with your heroine in love with a person named Sam and deliberately make the audience think it’s the quarterback of the high school football team before revealing that Sam is a female cheerleader.
What do we do with this property that brings something new to it and says, ‘Yes, we should make this’?” For me, that was found in representing characters that just weren’t properly represented in the ’70s and ’80s and the ’90s in these movies: telling their stories, and showing characters that normally weren’t the protagonists.
So it was really important to me to preserve both of those things: being true to the slasher subgenre, and also being true to the spirit of what it felt like reading those books as a teenager.
You open with this brutal killing, but you don’t do the thing where the core group of characters are getting picked off one at a time, so it starts to feel like maybe they’re going to all make it through.
But ultimately it was like, movie one, we’re in the third act of that movie when they die, but we’re in the first act of our trilogy.
And then when we’re brutally killing some of these people, it became a fun thing of, “Oh, look, we get to see them alive again.” In a different way, of course, but the characters had the same spirit inside of them.
I grew up in a suburban town right outside of Cleveland, so the idea of being able to take these familiar places and rip them apart and cover them in blood and destroy them was just really appealing.
And then the ’70s movie, I had never been to summer camp, even though I really, really wanted to go.
And then finally, I was like—and he was 16 at the time, now he’s 19—“Benji, do you know what this word means?” I had to explain.
They were excited about the opportunity to be releasing movies in this way that was this middle ground of their bingeable content, making it feel event-y.
When I was watching Mare of Easttown, I was like, “Goddamn, do I really have to wait for another week? I want all of it.” But I think that there are stories where it helps to wait that beat.
I feel really lucky that he is a creator that seems to genuinely be excited about the process of adaptation and giving the creative leeway to fill in the story in a different format and not constrict that process.
The one that I want to read, but I haven’t read, but I always admire the cover as being insane, it’s just called Cat.