Fear Street Part 1: 1994 movie review — A fun ode to Stranger Things, slasher films and high school horror

If it looks like nostalgia, and it feels like nostalgia, it must be nostalgia. When I saw that the Fear Street trilogy (dir. Leigh Janiak) was releasing on Netflix on Friday, 2 July, it sparked a throwback to the days spent checking the books out of my school library. The RL Stine series — Fear Street was the grown-up version of Goosebumps, targeted at teenagers — felt more adult than Nancy Drew mysteries and Hardy Boys cases, a spookier River Heights High that might initiate you into Stephen King’s works. Fear Street had adolescent angst and high school drama, but also supernatural horror that delivered genuine thrills. Fear Street Part 1: 1994 — streaming now — stays true to that ethos. Clocking in at an hour and 45 minutes, FS94 begins with the tale of two cities, Sunnyvale and Shadyside. The names are indicative of the towns’ fates: Sunnyvale is prosperous and flourishing, Shadyside is on the skids and going nowhere particularly good. This isn’t just a simple case of economics or bad planning or even luck; Shadyside is cursed, courtesy a long-dead witch called Sarah Frier. Shadyside’s denizens may scoff at or believe the myth, but the fact remains that macabre events are a constant in the town: murder sprees, mutilations, normal people “snapping” and attacking their friends and loved ones. Part One sets the tone with a sequence typical of ‘90s slasher films: a girl (Maya Hawke), among the last workers left for the day at the desolate Shadyside mall, answers a phone. A Scream-type villain — complete with black robe and skeleton mask — attacks her with a knife. She is the killer’s final victim in a bloody rampage that has claimed at least six others. When the local sheriff shoots him dead, the killer is revealed to be a teen who worked at the mall — yet another instance of the Shadyside curse at work. The story then shifts to the main cast of characters: Deena (Kiana Madeira, chanelling strong Eliza Dushku vibes), a cynical and angry high school student who is nursing a broken heart after splitting up with her girlfriend Sam; Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) has recently moved out of Shadyside and to Sunnyvale — a shift that represents the couple’s diverging outlooks on life as well. There’s Deena’s younger brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr), a nerd who spends his time researching how the town’s curse manifested over the years, exchanging instant messages over AOL, and pining for Deena’s best friend Kathy (Julia Rehwald), a go-getting cheerleader with a side hustle in dealing drugs. There’s also Simon (Fred Hechinger), Deena and Kathy’s easygoing, good-humoured buddy. [caption id=“attachment_9776141” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Still from Fear Street Part 1: 1994 | Netflix[/caption] Trouble brews when some of the Shadyside kids (including Deena, Kathy and Simon), having been involved in a brawl with some Sunnyvale jocks, are pursued by them in a car. Sam’s with her new boyfriend in the car, which crashes during the chase. Dazed and bleeding, she crawls out of the wreckage to see some frightening visions. Soon, the hooded villain from the mall reappears, this time targetting Deena, Kathy and Simon. Josh joins in to help out his sister with what he knows of the curse, and the four teens desperately attempt to beat their indestructible pursuer/s. The rest of the story follows the boilerplate arc of the teens pursued by supernatural killers fare: you know they’re going to be picked off one by one in increasingly gruesome ways, and that the vanquishing of the evil forces will prove only to be a temporary respite. This last sets up parts two and three of the Fear Street trilogy — 1978 and 1666, respectively. At times, Fear Street 1994 reminds you of pop culture milestones it is an ode to — Stranger Things and Scream, for instance — and those it isn’t, such as It Follows. This familiarity is both, a good thing (there’s a reason these franchises are so popular) and a limitation (the tropes and even visuals hold few surprises): The characters go off by themselves just when you know they should stick together and prevent the thinning of the herd. They’re on the cusp of being slaughtered, but they still find time for sex. Painful stabbing occurs. In short, this is Slasher Film 101. Recent horror films and series have primed us to expect the supernatural threat a stand-in for something more earthly: racism, trauma, misogyny, mental illness, the straitjacket of social conventions. FS94 is refreshing in that if it looks like a curse and feels like a curse, it must be a curse; here the witch is just a witch, and her creepy, super-efficient bloodhounds are just her creepy, super-efficient bloodhounds. With a back-story that’s to be explored in greater detail over its next two instalments, FS94 is an enjoyable first step. Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is now streaming on Netflix. Parts two and three of the trilogy will be released on 9 July and 16 July. Rating: 2.5 Watch the trailer here —