While Fear Street inspired chronic adolescent disappointment for many of its young readers throughout the 1990s, revisiting the series as an adult can be its own special sort of fun, if shocking when it comes to their thoughts on sex and gender. “I mean, middle-school sucks, but this type of genre, which is gory horror for teens, is all, ‘I don’t have problems, these people have problems – like there’s a killer on the loose and he might be my boyfriend!’ The stakes are so high that it makes everything else fall away.” “Once you reach a certain age, you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, I need to get away from the real world and go back to a time when the most stressful thing was middle-school stuff,’” Nugent says. Hosted by comedians Kelly Nugent and Lindsay Katai, the show dismantles the well-worn cliches and gonzo plotting of the genre, while celebrating the unusual nostalgic pleasures they continue to inspire. In the wake of the brand’s cancellation in 1999, Fear Street titles were mostly confined to some of the dustier shelves at used book stores, waiting in vain to be re-discovered by a generation who had already become well-versed in sex and slasher horror not from YA novelists but from the internet and cable TV.īut Fear Street has also undergone an unexpected resurgence in recent years, one spearheaded by one-time fans, leading to Stine returning to the series for a revival that launched this summer, the development of a feature film based on the series, and the launch of Teen Creeps, a popular comedy podcast celebrating the Stine oeuvre and works by fellow YA pulp maestros including Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan. While some dipped into the supernatural (notably the body-swap classic Switched), the majority were resolutely earthbound, revolving around stalkers, spurned exes or jealous BFFs. For the most part, Stine seemed to work from a title backwards, centering his stories around easily-relatable high school threats that took the form of, say, your boyfriend or girlfriend, the rich girl in class, the evil cheerleader, or the psychotic boy next door. Launched in 1989 and set in the fictional town of Shadyside, the Fear Street series ground down American adolescence to its most generic signifiers - jocks and cheerleaders, cliques and shopping malls, girls hyped for prom and boys riding motorcycles - then added violence.
There was occasional murder, mild swears and PG-13 sex, in the process introducing a generation of kids to the soapy dangers of sexual obsession, unscrupulous step-siblings and deep-seated rivalries.
Fear Street, his most enduring YA anthology series was comparatively adult. Goosebumps is arguably Stine’s most famous creation, but it was also an anthology horror series strictly for the kindergarten set, all gloopy ectoplasm and gross-out.
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