In July of 2021, I settled in on my couch with a big bowl of popcorn and pressed play on the first installment of Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, Fear Street: 1994. From the very opening scene, it was a blast from the past, a nostalgic romp through a neon-lit mall with marquees for B. Dalton and Gadzooks, simultaneously familiar and ephemeral, recognizable but now gone. From these first moments, narrative and visual references to the larger ‘90s horror landscape abound. It took me right back to my own early teenage days, browsing that B. Dalton, picking up another book by R.L. Stine (or Christopher Pike or Caroline Cooney or one of the many other Point Horror imprint authors). It was familiar and fun, just as I had hoped it would be.

Then came the tearful post-breakup scene between Deena (Kiana Madeira) and Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), and I found something I hadn’t even dared to hope for in this return to and reengagement with ‘90s teen horror: queer representation and same-sex desire. And a whole new world became possible. Or rather, a whole new way of seeing and reading, recalling and reframing those moments that had come before.

Sure, there were a wide range of terrible things in ‘90s teen horror novels, including Stine’s Fear Street series, but those terrible things happened almost exclusively to white, middle-class, straight, heteronormative kids. These were kids who spent a whole lot of time and energy thinking about what they should wear, how to navigate their high school hallways with the maximum amount of social capital, who they should (and shouldn’t) be seen with, what their peers thought of them, and how to get the opposite-sex object of their affections to ask them out. Stine’s Suki Thomas was pretty much the wildest character in the Fear Street series, with her brightly colored hair, wild jewelry, and alleged promiscuity. And Suki’s reputation and social life definitely suffered as a result of this deviation from normative expectations, as she is the frequent subject of salacious and dehumanizing gossip, often ostracized from much of the mainstream teen social structure of Stine’s Fear Street novels. There might occasionally be a person of color in a supporting role or a character whose family was struggling with poverty (which they almost always responded to by turning to some half-baked criminal endeavor), but these were anomalies. And there definitely weren’t any openly LGBTQIA+ characters.

As much as I loved these books—and I did—reading them while growing up in a small town in the rural Midwest was a homogenizing and isolating experience. There were expectations and limitations, lives that were clearly mapped out and lives that were almost unimaginable. There were a lot of things nobody talked about, so many ways of being and loving that were ignored, silenced, or erased. And when I escaped into one of these books, that silence and erasure persisted.

Watching Fear Street was like going back in time to those overwhelming and complicated teenage years, but going back to a potentially better version of them. It’s not a perfect world, of course: aside from the obvious challenges of trying not to get murdered by a horde of undead slashers and loads of generational trauma, social stratification, and injustice, Deena is frequently harassed for being openly gay. Sam flies a bit under the radar, passing as straight with her new boyfriend Peter (Jeremy Ford) and with her mother seeming to be at least initially unaware of the nature of her relationship with Deena (though Sam makes a public stand in that regard by kissing Deena goodbye toward the end of Fear Street: 1994). This is not an ideal or even an accepting world, but it is a world in which LGBTQIA+ voices are not silenced and where these characters’ existence is not erased.

As the trilogy continues, the centrality of Deena and Sam’s relationship remains constant and becomes the locus for the consideration of a wider scope of silence and erasure, particularly in Fear Street: 1666, when the relationship between Sarah Fier and Hannah Miller is central to the conflict in Union, the violence against these young women, and Sarah’s execution. While the historical figure of Sarah Fier is seen in frenetic flashbacks, where she is played by Elizabeth Scopel, for much of this segment, Sarah’s experiences are filtered through Deena’s perceptions, with Kiana Madeira performing this echo version of Sarah Fier. Olivia Scott Welch plays Hannah, with Sarah and Hannah’s relationship paralleling that of Deena and Sam in 1994, with similar prejudice and in 1666, horrifying violence. Through this parallel, we learn that Sarah Fier’s vengeance and dark legacy are grounded in this refusal and rejection: she was killed because of who she loved and she will not rest easy until justice has been done.

Through Sarah and Hannah’s relationship, as well as Deena and Sam’s, the Fear Street trilogy simultaneously highlights and refuses this history of erasure, claiming space for these women’s stories to be told across the centuries, both individually and as part of a larger narrative. Watching Fear Street: 1994, I found myself thinking about the stories that could have been told, the ones that were forced to the margins or the shadows, or whose existence were simply ignored altogether. And in doing so, my heart broke for those stories that were never told, what those stories would have meant to me, how they might have changed the way I—and so many other teen readers—saw and understood and felt our sense of belonging in the world.

But at the same time, my heart soared, because here was this story, right now, providing that opportunity to revisit and reframe, telling a love story that would not be silenced for a whole new generation, and one with a happy ending.