His books have been adapted for the screen before – the latest, based on his kid’s horror line Goosebumps, arrives in the US this week and the UK in February – and that is set to continue thanks to 20th Century Fox buying the rights to R.L. Stine’s Fear Street titles and developing a film.
As opposed to the Goosebumps stories, Fear Street is aimed at a teen readership and, while some contain supernatural elements, they’re more often murder mysteries with a higher level of violence than the tales for the younger crowd.
No details were offered as to which of the books might be the first to make the move to screens, but the series, which now numbers at least 100 titles, is set in the fictional city of Shadyside, Ohio. No doubt the studio and production company Chernin Entertainment will watch closely to see how Goosebumps – which stars Jack Black as a version of Stine trying to stop chaos when his manuscripts are unlocked and all the monsters escape – performs at the box office before deciding how much of a push **Fear Street **will get along the development process. Still, Stine’s name carries a lot of weight, especially with 500 million books sold around the world…