A circle of teenage friends accidentally encounter the ancient evil responsible for a series of brutal murders that have plagued their town for over 300 years. Welcome to Shadyside.

Netflix’s trilogy of horror films based on the series of young adult novels by R L Stine (Goosebumps) has a new movie released on three consecutive Fridays. The first instalment, co- written and directed by Leigh Janiak, is set in 1994 and how much you enjoy it will depend on how enamoured you are with the time period and just how familiar you are with the genre.

Wonder Woman 1984, American Horror Story and Stranger Things have enjoyed revelling in 80s nostalgia, but for me 1994 has less to latch onto. Sure, there’s a soundtrack of 90s bangers to contextualise the timeframe, but maybe I’m just too old for this sort of thing, which would appear to have been made for the millennials. If the Scream series or Buffy had never happened, then this might feel fresh, but instead it’s a generic retread of a decade’s horror output – from The Craft to I Know What You Did Last Summer, to the later Halloween sequels. In much the same way that Stine’s works serve as a gateway to horror literature, this feels like an adolescent ‘best of’ intro to the slasher flicks of that decade.

The cast are fine, the visual effects are as expected for such a decently-budgeted production, and the set pieces are proficiently put together. But everything about it, from the shock killing off of its star at the beginning to the relentless stop-start chases along corridors has been done before, and so much better.

Verdict: Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, and if you’re going to set your horror movie in this time period, you need to do more than regurgitate the tropes of a genre that by was (from a quality perspective) in a decline. 6/10

Nick Joy