Where Is 'Fear Street'?

Shadyside, Ohio exists but not in the way the "Fear Street" movie trilogy wants us to believe.  

The accursed town is not based on a particular place in real life. Although he was born and raised in Ohio, R.L. Stine, author of the "Fear Street" (and "Goosebumps") books, dreamed it up as any "one street that's cursed" in a "very normal, suburban town." Trilogy director Leigh Janiak never gave out where Shadyside from "Fear Street" is located as well, saying that it's a state of mind—any place where you feel like an outcast.

If you're asking where was "Fear Street" 1994 filmed, Ohio it's still not. Georgia towns like Atlanta and East Point came out and play for the project, shot within a four-month span in 2019. 

Netflix pimped Decatur's North DeKalb Mall into Shadyside Mall like it had transformed dying Atlanta mall Gwinnett Place into Starcourt Mall on "Stranger Things." 

North Dekalb Mall in Decatur, GA (above, taken with a Samsung SM-G950U by Mike Kalasnik) was chosen as filming location for Shadyside shopping mall on Netflix's 'Fear Street' trilogy

But where is Camp Nightwing located? Although the camp shares some occult history with the mall, the main setting for "Fear Street" 1978 was filmed at campsites in Hard Labor Creek State Park, Rutledge, 55 miles from Decatur. 

How about Shadyside's rival town? Is Sunnyvale real at least? The hoity-toity town exists IRL only by name too, in states like California, Texas and Missouri. 

It doesn't take a historian to know where "Fear Street" 1666 is based. A remote Georgia farm posed as Union, but the fictional colony appears to be a play on Salem, Massachusetts. America's worst witch trial hysteria took place there in the 1690s, less than three decades after the fictitious events of "Fear Street" 3. The real Shadyside, Ohio, in comparison, was established in 1879. 

Ohio has been home to some terrifying serial killers in history, most recently Anthony Sowell whose Cleveland house coughed up corpses of women. Tyler "Prostitute Killer" Wilson, cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Butcher of Kingsbury Run have also left a trail of bodies around the state. So viewer, beware—you're still in for a scare.