This article contains spoilers for the “Fear Street” trilogy. Type “queer horror films” into a search engine and you’ll get a bevy of articles poring over every gesture, sentence of dialogue and subtext in movie history, from “Psycho” to “The Babadook.” While queer characters have, in the last two decades, begun to move to the center in films like “Spiral” and “The Retreat,” they’re still too often merely implicit, made to seem like the other, or simply killed off.
But in the director Leigh Janiak’s “Fear Street” movies, a Netflix trilogy inspired by the author R.L. Stine’s horror series, queer people not only are the lead characters, but a lesbian romance propels the entire narrative.