THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT (WITH GORE)
YA author Sky Regina on the impact of R.L. Stine's Fear Street in the wake of book bans
This essay is the second of four in the Bookworm series, which focuses on horror films adapted from books. Bookworm is made possible by the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship Fund from the Horror Writers’ Association. Read the first essay here.
BY: Guest Writer Sky Regina
Kate: I mean, no one actually thinks this witch shit is real.
Simon: Yeah, it’s something babysitters make up to scare kids.
- Fear Street Part 1: 1994
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I sniffed out spooky lore like it was candy.
I was fortunate enough to have a bed with a partial view of my parents’ TV, which meant my first viewings of The Shining, Scream, and Pet Sematary happened between my splayed fingers and Tetris sessions on my brother’s stolen Gameboy. The violent gutting of Casey Becker’s boyfriend in Scream’s opening scene left me internally tangled up with regret and images I couldn’t unsee. But somehow, that particular brand of distress only fueled my desire for more spooky shit. Before I learned to read, I crafted my own bone-chilling tales with the sole purpose of scaring myself before falling asleep. I imagined a wailing banshee waiting at my window or a child-stealing pirate with a hook hand lurking under my bed. It was pretty masochistic, but it was also a huge rush.
As I got older, I devoured every macabre book I could get my grubby hands on, starting with ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Bunnicula’ before graduating to the more sophisticated — and library-restricted — ‘Fear Street’ series by R.L. Stine. Known as one of the best-selling young adult book series of all time, the first ‘Fear Street’ installment was published in 1989, which meant it was most ’90s kids’ gateway drug to horror novels. Stine has been described as the “literary training bra for Stephen King,” an apt comparison that also captures his trademark brand of wry humor.
What Stine recognized is something integral to adolescence — exploring the imaginary by engaging with make-believe monsters helps young people bridge the gap between experience and knowledge. Before kids understand that the sounds coming from behind the walls are caused by skittering rodents or swelling pipes, they make sense of the unknown by fantasizing. Anxiety and adrenaline are twin emotions — both induce similar physiological effects, but one is considered negative and to be avoided, while the other is sought after. Children don’t often know how to differentiate between the two, which is why I think they seek these gut-churning, pulse-spiking feelings in scary stories — a low-risk, high-reward pursuit. Stories and allegories are a safe space to look horror in the face, before connecting the dots to the harsh realities of the real world.
Most kids have their own version of the boogeyman — fictional evil entities that gobble up their fear, haunt their dreams, and dwell in the dark corners of their imaginations. Feeling scared can be really fun, as long as the threat can’t actually hurt you. More zombie, vampire, and gremlin than small-town serial killer with sharp knives that draw young blood.
Horror maestro and comedy enthusiast Stine has always understood that. He previously edited a humor magazine, and wrote comedic stories under the pseudonym ‘Jovial Bob Stine.’ In his Masterclass, Stine theorized that laughter and fear cause the same visceral reaction, and that you need one to temper the other. He also said horror is easier to write than comedy because we all share the same fears — and that’s true across age gaps.
“I’ve got to write these scary books,” Stine said in a 2014 interview with Mental Floss. “That’s what these kids want. Kids like to be scared…The lucky thing about horror is that the things people are afraid of, it never changes. Afraid of the dark, afraid someone’s in the house, afraid someone’s under your bed — that’s the same.”
Nineties kids remember the ‘Fear Street’ books as products of their youth, though the most recent book was released in 2019 as part of the ‘Return to Fear Street’ series. The record-breaking young adult (YA) horror series inspired a ‘Fear Street’ revival (piggybacking on the trend of content geared toward those ravenous for millennial nostalgia) as a Netflix film trilogy, released over three weeks in July 2021.
The trilogy wasn’t adapted from a specific book; rather, it borrows elements of the original series (ex: the fictional town of Shadyside, characters from the Fier and Goode families, etc.) to create a new narrative that captures the subversive spirit of the books. Staying true to the bloody slashics director/co-writer Leigh Janiak says inspired the vibe of the trilogy, the films pump up the gore to hardcore levels — in one particularly gruesome scene, a girl’s face is reduced to bloody ribbons after her head’s pushed through a bread slicer — deviating from the much milder content of the books to appeal to a wider, and older, audience.
As an author of YA horror, I’ve noticed the discrepancy between what’s allowed in movies and what’s allowed in books made for teen audiences continues to exist. YA books have to jump through seemingly endless hoops as they move through the publishing process because of the limitations set by the school and library systems. Too much gore/swearing/sex/other controversial content in teen stories means they’re far less likely to be included in the canon of “acceptable” or “appropriate” books, which also means most publishers won’t acquire them. Not having school or library support is bad for business, and traditional publishing is, first and foremost, a business that prioritizes safe financial bets.
It can be frustrating having to navigate all these restrictions and watering down my writing to fit a narrow mold, especially when teen movies seem to “get away” with including far more contentious content — which I wholeheartedly support; let the teens have the messy blood and profanity of real life.
Some progress has been made. Fantastic, boundary-pushing YA horror novels like ‘The Honeys’ by Ryan La Sala and ‘The Taking of Jake Livingston’ by Ryan Douglass (who’s been very outspoken online about the bullshit of publishing gatekeepers’ refusal to take risks in YA) have managed to slip through the cracks and make it onto bookshelves. But these types of books, both of which also happen to be written by queer authors and center queer main characters, are the exception. And, of course, they tend to cause a stir among those hellbent on suppressing and censoring teen literature. But the powers that be in the YA publishing industry often forget to cater to their target audience — readers aged 12 to 18 — and what they’re actually interested in reading.
According to Marcia Kochel, teacher librarian in Decatur, GA, tweens often prefer to read books geared toward a slightly older age bracket with grittier themes and higher stakes. She says: “When I do booktalks, kids gravitate toward shocking topics. For example, if I say a book is about a school shooting, or an alien invasion, or a mysterious plane crash, kids will pick it up. Many middle schoolers are looking for horror books that are actually scary, and it can take a lot to scare a middle school kid.”
When I was ready to up the ante on edgy content, my steady diet of ‘Goosebumps’ — both the books and the TV episodes — naturally paved the way to ‘Fear Street’. But this happened years before my school library deemed me old enough. Much like the thrill of trying to rent an R-rated movie, those forbidden ‘Fear Street’ books shelved next to Christopher Pike’s pulpy paperbacks stoked my curiosity, leaving me salivating for stories just out of my reach. My school librarians acted as the gatekeepers to these alluring, off-limits novels, keeping them under lock and key until I turned 13, the apparently magical age when tweens enter teenhood and can finally “handle” the gritty subject matter considered inappropriate for 12-and-unders.
I remember a few times when my horror-hungry friends and I convinced an older kid to borrow the restricted teen books and share them with us as though they were contraband cigarettes or nudie mags. We’d read the especially salacious bits aloud, giggling during recess about “buxom blondes” with blood trailing from several orifices. These relatively tame books paled in comparison to the horror films a lot of us had already watched, of course, but there was something about their bootlegged nature that fueled their novelty. We wanted them more because we weren’t allowed to access them, except at the Scholastic Book Fair (speaking of, Scholastic’s recent response to book censorship was so bad, they had to issue an apology) if you were lucky enough to have parents who either didn’t care about or were too busy to monitor what you were reading.
Fictional horror has always been a comfort, a way to escape the real-life horrors of youth: the mass school shootings, the insidious cruelty of bullying, the close-to-home terror attacks. I still prefer the anxiety caused by movie and book monsters over the human ones that can actually hurt me — people are far scarier. So why do adults feel the need to censor young people from book boogeymen that can’t actually claw through the page and tear their hearts out? Or even from stories that show the grit of reality in the guise of protecting the children from “perversity”? Author Ryan La Sala thinks it isn’t really about protecting the children at all; rather, the censorship movement is more about adults “churning up resentment against communities.”
The absurdity of these types of literary restrictions for youth is now echoing across the US, with book banning spreading simultaneously with the even more absurd — and not to mention dangerous — passing of anti-LGBTQ+ laws. The two are inextricably linked, with more and more queer books making the banned book list by the day. A recent report by PEN America found that during the first half of the 2022-23 school year, 26% of banned titles had LGBTQ+ characters or themes, and that these content categories appeared more commonly among banned books: violence and abuse, health and wellbeing, and themes of grief and death.
So if modern teens can’t get their fill of relevant and, at times, life-saving stories through literature, at least they’re more likely to find them in film. The Fear Street trilogy is a stylish and entertaining love letter to ‘90s teen horror, ‘70s summer camp slashers, and Salem-esque, witch-trial folklore, but it also grounds each film’s plot with contemporary themes, despite the historical settings of 1994, 1978, and 1666. Tackling generational trauma, queer love and homophobia, and the dangers of mob mentality, power imbalance, and entitlement, the film trilogy serves its blood n’ gore with heaping scoops of emotional depth and character development — things the books severely lack — and has tons of fun while doing it.
The filmmaker’s experience mirrored my own: we both remembered how scandalous the books were to us in our youth, while rereading them as adults was obviously far less intense.
Janiak called the books “pretty tame” in a Slate interview: “But my memory was of subversive violence and sex and all of these things. 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.”
She more than succeeded. Watching the trilogy brought me back to adolescence, when I secretly inhaled juicy tales of murder and betrayal that would one day inspire my own writing. And like YA author Ryan Douglass, my goal is to write diverse characters fighting for their lives “to give a kid something real to relate to — something as ugly as his waking life.” 🪱
Sky Regina is a freelance editor and writer from Toronto, Ontario. Her fiction is represented by Lucy Hamilburg at The Hamilburg Agency. When she needs a brain break from writing, she can usually be found hunched over campy horror novels with her terrier pup by her side, or devising believable ways to worm her way out of social commitments (to spend more time with her dog).
Extra credit: Check out Slate’s Scaredy Scale, which describes the Fear Street trilogy as “...the ideal on-ramp for tweens raised on R.L. Stine books to work their way up to full-fledged horror,” for a deep-dive into how Fear StreetPart 1: 1994 earned its R rating.
“The Librarian Who Couldn’t Take it Any More,” from the Washington Post