From Fear Street — to real horror
Why the director behind the Netflix smash is taking on a real-life scare story
WITH NETFLIX’S FEAR Street trilogy, director Leigh Janiak brought serious scares to our summer; next up, she’s turning her attention to a real-life horror story. Janiak is directing two episodes of HBO Max’s The Staircase, the miniseries based on the acclaimed true-crime documentary of the same name.
The doc — originally a French production from 2004, which Netflix picked up and expanded in 2018 — centred on the mysterious death of Kathleen Peterson in her Forest Hills home in late 2001. Her novelist husband Michael claims he found her body at the bottom of the stairs after an apparent drunken fall — but the police pegged him as a killer, building a case that he bludgeoned her to death.
The dramatised version is being created by The Devil All The Time director Antonio Campos (“He’s been developing it for years,” says Janiak), with the Fear Street filmmaker on board to helm the episodes that Campos isn’t directing himself. “It jumps back and forth in time,” she tells Empire of the series’ approach. “The documentary focuses on the trial and the process of what the American justice system did to Michael Peterson. The show is interested in all facets around that, of the people involved, his family, of the documentary film crew.” Campos and Janiak have assembled one hell of a cast for the show, with Colin Firth as Michael Peterson and Toni Collette as Kathleen — while Sophie Turner, Juliette Binoche, Parker Posey, Dane Dehaan and Michael Stuhlbarg are also set to star. But for Janiak, the focus will be on not forgetting the real people behind the story. “It’s daunting, because I want to be true and respectful of all of the people involved,” she says. It sounds as if we could be in for a true-crime drama about the true-crime phenomenon. “It’s looking at how this event played out beyond [the trial],” she says “That is what’s interesting to me — what the nature of truth is and how we form narratives.” Consider us already hooked. THE STAIRCASE IS COMING SOON