The Slasher Trilogy Fear Street in a Comparative Perspective: Between Intertextuality and Diversity

Abstract

This paper analyzes the slasher horror trilogy Fear Street (Leigh Janiak, 2021) from a comparative perspective, focusing on the genre’s conventions and its recent transformations. Each film in the trilogy references and appropriates different historical moments of horror cinema: the first part engages with the self-referential slasher of the 1990s, the second draws on the classic slasher of the 1970s, and the third hybridizes slasher and historical horror (witch films). We are particularly interested in examining how the slasher genre, as exemplified by Fear Street, has remained adaptable in response to shifting social sensibilities and demands for greater diversity and intertextual complexity in contemporary audiovisual narratives.