For children’s horror author R.L. Stine, nothing beats scaring the hell out of kids. In the ’90s, he chilled a generation with his Goosebumps …
For children’s horror author R.L. Stine, nothing beats scaring the hell out of kids. In the ’90s, he chilled a generation with his Goosebumps and Fear Street books, but these days, the scares come in podcasts. Stine’s old books are still finding new life as they continue being adapted for the big and small screens more than 30 years after being published: the original Goosebumps TV series in the ’90s, two new movies starring Jack Black in the late 2010s and a three-part movie series based on his Fear Street books coming to Netflix in July. “I think readers of those books are gonna be in for a shock with the movies, because the movies are R rated,” Stine told me. “There’s a lot of screaming. A lot of kids die.” The R-rated Fear Street trilogy will drop across three consecutive weeks. Fear Street Part One: 1994 debuted on July 2. Fear Street Part Two: 1978 will debut on July 9 and Fear Street Part Three: 1666 on July 16. They’ll show 300 years of brutal murders in one small town called Shadyside, set in high school in the ’90s and Camp Nightwing in the ’70s, before going back to the origins of the curse in the 1600s. Read more: New movies coming out in 2021: Netflix, Marvel and more blockbusters “My involvement consisted of going down to the set one day, and watching them film a scene out in a pasture in Atlanta where it was 120 degrees and with Atlanta humidity,” Stine said. “They built a colonial village, an amazing entire village with pigs running around, and I spent one day on the set, watching them film.” The movies were originally filmed for Fox, but COVID-19 put an end to those plans as theaters closed.
