‘Fear Street’ Trilogy Doesn’t End Here: Leigh Janiak Hopes to Create Horror Spin on MCU

Kate Erbland
·3 min read

[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for the “Fear Street” trilogy.]

Like any cinematic series hoping to keep going, the final film in Leigh Janiak’s “Fear Street” trilogy sets up for plenty more thrills and chills to come. While “Fear Street Part 3: 1666” ends on a high, as Deena (Kiana Madeira), Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.), Martin (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and Constance (Gillian Jacobs) vanquish an ancient evil, clear Sarah Fier’s name (and witchy past), and seem to make some pretty big inroads toward saving their long ill-fated hometown of Shadyside, a post-credits scene threatens that peace.

More from IndieWire

As the heroes celebrate and the credits spin by, we journey back into the local mall, site of so many of the film’s horrors and the group’s final stand-off, as an unseen pair of hands reach out to grab the spell book left behind by Sheriff Goode (Ashley Zukerman), one of the last descendants of the family that has really been haunting Shadyside and neighboring Sunnyvale for so long. Goode might be gone, but it seems as if the evil his family long ago conjured via the book might have already ensnared a new devotee. One thing is for sure: this story isn’t over yet, and no one is more thrilled about that than filmmaker Leigh Janiak, who directed all three films.

“One of the exciting things about ‘Fear Street’ is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space,” Janiak said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “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.”

Of course, it depends on how audiences feel about the current trilogy, which has unfolded over the last three weeks on Netflix, with a new film dropping each Friday morning. If people dig it, Janiak said, the franchise could expand into all sorts of new projects.

“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.”

As for Janiak, she knows what story she really wants to see next: the kind of slasher even a devoted gorehound like herself has never seen before. “I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie, which I haven’t really seen and what that means,” Janiak said. “It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan.”

“Fear Street Part 1: 1994,” “Fear Street Part 2: 1978,” and “Fear Street Part 3: 1666” are all streaming on Netflix now.

Best of IndieWire

Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.