So this is a horror movie on Netflix, based on a series of kidbooks by R.L. Stine, an author so prolific I don’t even know if they’re a real person or a house name. As you’d think from an adaptation of kidbooks, it’s a fairly YA kind of horror — all about teens, featuring a spooky legend, and with big dollops of PG-rated horniness.

Straight-up genre slasher horror isn’t really my thing, so it’s not particularly useful to note that my reaction was fairly meh. (Jess liked it more.) But I do feel like it’s meaningful that it felt like a TV show.

Part of that, to be fair, is that I misread a “time remaining” as “total time” and thought it was a 70 minute thing, which seemed like a TV-ish length; but more of it is that it just has the feel of a CW show. Maybe like the two-part premiere or something, but still. And then a large part of it is that this is not a complete story. It’s the first of three movies in the Fear Streetiverse, and it’s basically just setting up the main conflict, and ends on kind of a cliffhanger. It feels about as self-contained as The Fellowship of the Ring. Combine that kinda TVish feel with the episodic nature of the story, and it’s no wonder that it seemed more like an episode than a film.

If you like slasher horror, this seems like it’ll hit the notes you want while being competently executed; but for someone who doesn’t care for the genre, it’s not doing much beyond that.