It’s crunchtime for Leigh Janiak.
The writer-director is less than two months away from her Netflix debut, and she’s mixing sound and reviewing special effects with a clock ticking in the background. Only her process is moving at a much more harried pace than usual, since Janiak, as the director of the Fear Street trilogy, is trying to finish three movies at once. When she does, she and her producers at Chernin Entertainment will try an experiment with Netflix: For the first time, the streamer will release a movie weekly three Fridays in a row, beginning 2 July.
Think bingeing for movie lovers.
“It’s kind of a hybrid. It’s kind of a new thing,” Janiak said. “It’s a mix between a traditional movie and what would be considered traditional TV: Each instalment, each part, tells its own story but it’s also very connected to the next piece. That is a very exciting thing for me as a filmmaker.”
It’s also quite ambitious. The three movies, based on RL Stine books, span some 300 years and star a who’s who of today’s brightest young talent: Sadie Sink from Stranger Things, Kiana Madeira from Trinkets, and Chiara Aurelia from Cruel Summer. All three films, budgeted around $20 million each, connect around a 300-year-old incident that’s been terrorising the fictional Shadyside, Ohio, for generations.
The first film takes place in 1994 and is heavy on mall culture and early AOL chats while paying homage to the Scream movies and I Know What You Did Last Summer. The second film is set at a summer camp in the year 1978 — think short shorts and colour wars — and references both Friday the 13th and Halloween. Janiak said her shooting style for the third film, set in 1666, was inspired by Terrence Malick’s The New World.
Netflix introduced television bingeing in 2013 when it dropped the entire season of House of Cards at once. This weekly experiment represents a similar approach, one that, if it works, could make movies as sticky and as valuable as the television series the streamer is known for.
A weekly schedule “is the sweet spot where it gives enough space and time for each of the films to stand independently on their own,” said Lisa Nishimura, Netflix’s vice president of independent film and documentary features.
The hope is that the trilogy will start a cultural conversation.
“Leigh’s created these worlds and these characters that you really fall in love with," Nishimura said. "So the ability to, in a week, come with the next film that continues the story, gives audiences a wonderful kind of interlocking of narratives that they will want to stay inside of and be deeply engaged with.”
The experiment is only possible because it was designed this way from the outset.
20th Century Fox, before being bought by Disney, acquired the beloved teenage-centric series in 2015 for Chernin Entertainment to produce. The multimillion dollar purchase — Stine wrote 52 books set in Shadyside, selling more than 100 million copies — meant that the producers needed to think differently about how to exploit the source material. One film at a time wasn’t an efficient option.
Instead, the producers created a writers’ room, a practice common for television but one rarely used in film. Because the company had ambitions for a franchise from the beginning, the thinking was that a group of writers could “break” the entire story over a series of movies. Writers worked together both before Janiak came aboard and after she was involved.
“We were not hiring one person to do one movie,” Chernin Entertainment’s chief executive, Peter Chernin, said in an interview. “We were really trying to think about how do we build a movie world where we could do multiple movies.”
Once the world was created and the scripts were complete, Janiak, 41, shot all three films at once — a tremendous endeavour for any filmmaker to take on. For Janiak, this was only her second feature project, after her 2014 debut, the horror film Honeymoon, brought her to Hollywood’s attention. She filmed for 106 days, mostly at night, in Atlanta, toggling between three different time periods with three different shooting styles. She also spent a great deal of time remembering what initially drew her to the Fear Street series while growing up in Ohio.
“I think as a teenage girl, you kind of already live in this world that’s a little dangerous,” she said. “Fear Street was like my world but crazier, more terrible and more bloody.”
Janiak was also looking to subvert the horror genre she loves by focusing more on misfits and outsiders, the frequent heroes of Stine’s series.
“Our characters normally wouldn’t have lived past the first 15 minutes” of a traditional horror film, Janiak added. “Our movies are telling the stories of the perpetual outsiders.”
Three movies in three weeks meant that Janiak could include clues in each film that would only be understood after watching all three movies. Netflix is certain the Easter eggs will encourage audiences to return to the trilogy again and again — the very definition of sticky content.
Take Nishimura’s experience.
“When I finished watching Part 3, the only thing I wanted to do was to start all over again and watch Part 1, and I saw something different because I had the opportunity to experience the totality of the mythologies,” she said. “So I anticipate that once all three of the films are in the world, there’s going to be a lot of chatter around the things that they get to discover.”
Nicole Sperling c.2021 The New York Times Company
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