'Fear Street' Director Wants To Create A Horror Cinematic Universe To Rival The MCU

Have you heard? Shared universes are all the rage these days and no amount of extremely public failures by studios not named Marvel are going to deter anyone from achieving that fabled and very trendy golden goose.

That said, we can suspend our skepticism a bit when it comes to Netflix's gory and tremendously fun Fear Street trilogy that recently came to a satisfying close. The movies might have ended, but director Leigh Janiak isn't nearly done with the franchise — if she gets her way. While talking to IndieWire, Janiak detailed her ambitions for the Shadysiders and their hundreds of years-long battle against evil.

"One of the exciting things about 'Fear Street' is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space. 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."

It's not terribly surprising to get this insight into the process and realize that the MCU is being used as a measuring stick for all potential franchises these days. One would think that a popular trilogy of solid and thrilling horror movies, all released within a week of the last one to drum up and maintain excitement, would be more than enough to be considered a runaway success. But why stop there, right? Along those lines, Janiak zeroes in on the fan engagement side of things and how viewer reception can affect the future of this story.

"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. 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."

In fairness, the plot and mythology of the trilogy does naturally lend itself to all sorts of time and genre-jumping. Who's to say we have to stay limited to the main group of characters we grew to love and hated to see die (in very gruesome and spectacular ways, might I add)? In one of the very final images in Fear Street: 1666, we see a mysterious hand snatch away the sinister book of spells that helped cause all this mayhem in the first place. There would seem to be a pretty open-ended way to continue things, should Janiak and Netflix see fit.

Janiak herself is certainly thinking along those lines, teasing one future story she'd love to see. "I really started getting excited about a '50s slasher movie, which I haven't really seen and what that means. It's just cool to think about the different eras and what's possible as a horror fan."

We'll have to wait and see if the online hype translated to real-world numbers for the streaming service. Until then, the entire Fear Street trilogy is available to stream right this second on Netflix.