By Dominique Tassell
Nostalgia is trending, and studios are pumping out the reboots. Horror is no stranger to this, with classics like The Silence of the Lambs and the Halloween series getting the modernisation treatment in recent years.
Now, it’s time for the resurgence of teen horror.
We saw a taster of this in 2018 with the Heathers miniseries, but the teen horror renaissance is well and truly here.
One of the best current examples of this is Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin.
All ten episodes of the series are available to stream on Binge now. While the original Pretty Little Liars series was more of a thriller, the new series leans heavily into horror.
The slasher series follows the lives of a group of teenage girls who live in Millwood, Pennsylvania, after receiving terrifying and cryptic messages from a mysterious assailant named “A”, holding them responsible for something tragic that their mothers did that resulted in the death of a classmate 22 years earlier. The girls are forced to team up to figure out what happened during the year 1999 and what roles their mothers played in the tragedy.
The show is both an effective teen horror series and an effective reboot. The characters will feel familiar to watchers of the original show, but also feel like they could have been created for a brand-new show in 2022.
It’s been renewed for a second season, and rightfully so.
But not every teen horror offering is as successful.
I Know What You Did Last Summer landed on Amazon Prime last year, and is a reboot of the 90s classic where teenagers are stalked by a mysterious killer a year after a fatal accident on the night of their graduation.
This one adds in a couple of extra elements, including (spoiler) some switched twins.
The campiness falls flat and feels incredibly forced. The show feels like it’s trying to tick too many boxes, with far too much forced into the eight-episode run.
The series was not renewed, and understandably.
It’s not all about the reboots, with movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies dropping recently too. There’s also been an uptick in campy-dark comedy teen offerings, such as Netflix’s new movie Do Revenge. As one reviewer said, “a teenage girl on the path of vengeance can be more frightening than any monster or horror movie slasher”.
