Just the Ticket #160: Fear Street

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Last week, I reviewed the 1995 Goosebumps TV series, the research for which informed me that, following his early work as "Jovial Bob" Stine, R.L. Stine received the recommendation to try writing horror for a teen audience, and so began writing the Fear Street series, for which his wife, Jane Waldhorn, created Parachute Press as an intermediary publisher in their dealings with Scholastic (which now owns Parachute as part of the later resolution to Stine's contract dispute and falling out with the larger publisher-turned-multimedia company). So, I was Last Week Years Old when I learned that Goosebumps was actually Stine's second major book franchise, once he had figured out how to write horror for younger audiences and was asked to write another series that skewed younger than Fear Street.

Because I was introduced to Stine's work at a younger age, I never got into Fear Street. And despite knowing the old saying, my judgment of its book covers biased me away from reading them, giving the impression that they were for older, female audiences (titles like The Babysitter and Prom Queen didn't help my interest in that regard, either). However, for this review, I consulted several informational and fan sources to determine how faithful to the books the movie trilogy was, or if any characters carried over. But I'll get into that in the review itself.

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Released over three weeks in July (see the above poster), 2021's Fear Street Trilogy follows a long history of bloody tragedy and unnatural prosperity in the fictional neighboring towns of Shadyside and Sunnyvale (the latter one letter away from me being able to make a "built on a Hellmouth" joke), beginning with Fear Street Part One: 1994.

We immediately know that this is a Netflix project (aside from the logo and the fact that it's on Netflix) because the opening scene involves the death of a bookstore employee (which gives the movie the opportunity to pan over hardcover facsimiles of Fear Street titles by Robert Lawrence - that's what the R.L. in R.L. Stine stands for) played by Stranger Things' Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman). Sadie Sink shows up in the second and third films.

This spree killing, from the killer's costume choice (a black-and-white skeleton costume with a sufficiently creepy skull mask) to using a knife and being fast but uncoordinated, takes strong inspiration from Scream. But the movie itself is far from a Scream clone, as the killer is quickly dispatched by Sunnyvale Sheriff Nick Goode (an ironic spoiler of a last name, and he's played in the first and third films by Succession's Ashley Zukerman, and by The Walking Dead: World Beyond's Ted Sutherland in the second) and unmasked as Shadyside resident Ryan Torres (Gotham's David W. Thompson). Everyone comes to believe that Ryan "just went crazy," but the land that Shadyside and Sunnyvale were built on is steeped in legend of a witch's curse (the one aspect of the books' lore that is carried over into the trilogy, though the names and relationships from the inciting event are different and the supernatural element is less important in the books than than the movies) that may have more truth to it than anyone knows...except for Josh (this series' conspiracy theory tech nerd - because Roland Emmerich movies made that heroic archetype okay, I guess, even in a release year when January 6 happened and people still listened to what Alex Jones and Fox News had to say - played by Your Honor's Benjamin Flores, Jr.), his sister Deena (the final girl of the trilogy, played by frequent book adaptation star Kiana Madeira), and her ex-but-maybe-not-ex-girlfriend Sam (Lucky Hank's Olivia Scott Welch). When Sam chances upon the witch's (named Sarah Fier) one-handed remains after a prank gone wrong, the curse gets a taste for her blood, and it's up to Deena, Josh, and their redshirt friends to defend her from T-1000 Venom ghosts of the previous dead killers, culminating in a late-night showdown at a supermarket that features a gruesome death-by-bread-slicer and is resolved by killing Sam so the killers stop going after her and then reviving her...only for Sam to later get possessed herself, ending the first movie on a cliffhanger twist and setting up for Part Two. Despite the movie ignoring its own title and using an obnoxious amount of (admittedly well chosen) music cues to scream, "THIS MOVIE IS SET IN 1994!!!!" (Nine Inch Nails, Cypress Hill, Bush, Garbage, White Town, etc.), 1994 is probably the strongest of the trilogy, not relying too much on formula and genre tropes, and letting relationships, strategy, and mystery do the heavy lifting between the few bloody dash-and-slash sequences. The runtime is short, the setting feels intimate but with a sense of scale, and the digital effects look convincing enough.

A-

The runtimes get incrementally longer with each movie, and it's no more apparent than in Fear Street Part Two: 1978. The supporting characters are meaner, the leads flat, and the movie itself nigh unnecessary.

The music still screams of its titular year, but compared to the rest of the film, and the first entry's blatant nostalgia-wanking, that's only a minor criticism.

Having tracked down "C. Berman" (the only known survivor of the 1978 Camp Nightwing massacre aside from future Sheriff Nick Goode, and the only person to ever survive bleeding on Sarah Fier's remains up to that point, played in 1994 by Community's Gillian Jacobs and in the 1978 flashback by Sink), Deena (who survived being stabbed by a possessed Sam at the end of the previous film and tied her up with a phone cord offscreen) and Josh (who is also there) seek her help in ending the curse and curing Sam. This leads into a flashback to 1978 where C. Berman, a.k.a. Christine "Ziggy" Berman, (though it's kept vague throughout the movie as to whether she or her older sister are the survivor because her sister's name is Cindy) is being bullied (like, Children Of the Corn 2023 levels of bullying to where it's basically a juvenile hate crime and almost murder) at Camp Nightwing because she's rebellious and the "cool kids" think she's possessed. While she and Nick make awkward googly eyes at each other and the rest of the campers prepare for the "Color War" (a series of childhood games between Shadyside and Sunnyvale, but with a questionable name that could totally apply to more violent, socially repugnant conflicts in the real world), Shadysider Tommy Slater (the awesomely named, appropriately creepy-sexy McCabe Slye) begins his slow transformation into Baghead Jason Voorhees but totally different because axe. The camp nurse, who is the mother of one of the previous killers, and is played by The Huntress' Jordana Spiro, somehow senses the evil growing in Tommy, and gets arrested when she tries to kill him. This prompts Ziggy's older sister (live-action Nami, Emily Rudd) and her friend Alice (The Exorcism's Ryan Simpkins) to investigate the nurse's diary, and they are trapped in the witch's cave system when a possessed Tommy comes after them. He gets bored, brutally kills a bunch of idiots, Cindy and Alice talk in the cave for what feels like forever, Alice finds Sarah Fier's severed hand, Cindy escapes by climbing out of an outhouse toilet because cursed convenient crap caves are convenient, Alice somehow makes it aboveground offscreen despite having a broken leg, Ziggy nosebleeds on Sarah Fier's hand, and she and Cindy are killed recreating the Cistine Chapel

until Nick shows up to give Ziggy CPR because 80s CPR can heal anything even though it's the wrong way to do CPR and Ziggy has been stabbed at least a dozen times.

Fear Street 1978 is one of those "why have hope when you know everyone is going to die" prequels, it's an obvious Friday the 13th ripoff, its pacing is agonizing, its characters are the wrong mix of horndog, asshole, and idiot, and the sisters' death poses were more biblically blatant than a Superman Jesus moment.

D

But then, when the flashback is over, Deena, Josh, and Ziggy reunite Sarah Fier's hand with her body (which Sam accidentally discovered in the first entry), and Deena is thrust back in time to see the true circumstances of Sarah Fier's death through her eyes, setting up for Part Three.

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (because 1999 wasn't the only "this seems like the perfect time for a devil movie" year, and 1666 was smack in the middle of the witch-hunt part of Puritan American history, even using the accurate means of execution - hanging instead of burning at the stake, which was more of a British thing at the time) is the long version of that time-travel episode in 90s kids' shows where people's families were genetically perfect because actors played their characters' ancestors to cut costs and exposition time, so everyone has to try to hold an Irish accent for most of the movie. Because Deena is just bearing witness in Sarah Fier's body, not trying to fit in as she changes history like would be the case in most narratives like this, we get a decent mystery on our hands as to what led to Sarah's hanging and who the real villain(s) have been all along. No jukebox musical cues to tie down the timeline here, just good, literally olde-fafhioned (because the s used to be a stylized f back then) superstition and paranoia as our "evil witch" learns the true nature of the one man she thought she could trust. So, yeah; the surname of ironic foreshadowing, Nick being the only other survivor of the 1978 massacre, the influential prosperity of his family and Sunnyvale while Shadyside gets slummier and more notorious as the "Murder Capital Of the World"...? Nick's ancestor, Solomon Goode, made a pact with the devil and framed Sarah Fier for it, sacrificing the land Shadyside would later be built on and "one name every few years" (even though that named person would kill others in the process) in exchange for power, and the family legacy has continued ever since.

Once Sarah has been hanged, Deena returns to the present for Fear Street Part Three: Fear Street Part One: 1994 Part Two (which is presented a lot more clearly than that sounds), where Deena, Josh, Christine/Ziggy, and Martin (a background character Nick apparently framed for vandalism in the first movie, played by Judas And the Black Messiah's Darrell Britt-Gibson) team up to kill Nick in the most 90s way possible: by tricking the unstoppable killers into attacking him in the Shadyside mall by way of Home Alone traps, glow-in-the-dark paint laced with Deena's blood, and Super Soakers. But this doesn't go as planned because it has to go as scripted, so Nick ends up getting some poetic comeuppance when he chases Deena into the tunnels beneath Shadyside and she makes him experience visions of all the death his family has caused over the centuries (there's this big pile of fly-ridden CGI organs in the cave that's basically the trilogy's physical manifestation of Satan, where all of the unstoppable goo-killers spawn from, and Deena makes him touch that) before she kills him. This is enough to end the curse even though there are shown to be other living members of the Goode family in Sunnyvale, Deena and Sam are a couple again, Josh meets his chatroom girlfriend (a minor, unresolved plot point from the first movie) IRL, who offers to help him invent the IPod, and we get a post-credits scene where an unknown person steals the book with the Satanic curse in it (yeah, our heroes just left the source of all evil sitting in the cave instead of burning it for some reason, even though they knew it was still down there), setting up a potential fourth movie. Stupidest. Ending. Ever.

B

There is supposed to be another Fear Street movie coming at some point, but is said to be unconnected to the trilogy, instead adapting Stine's Prom Queen novel. Posters can be found online, calling it Fear Street Part Four: 1988, and it has a more substantial Wikipedia page than one would expect for a movie with no release date.

Reader and viewer beware, as next week, I return to the world of Goosebumps for a look at the Disney+ series so far, and for Halloween the following week, I'll cover the movies.

As always, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post, give my ad revenue a hand as you read so I have nothing to Fier, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my spine-chilling content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.