Written by Sam Niles
Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is an R-rated movie aimed at a young demographic. An adaptation of R.L. Stine’s book series for teens (itself a stepping stone for his elementary school Goosebumps audience) Leigh Janiak’s film is designed to be a kid’s first R-rated movie. It’s a movie you’d watch with your friends at a late-night sleepover, relishing in the blood spilt and F-words dropped.
While based on an anthology book series, Fear Street is neither an anthology film, nor just based on one single book. Like 2015’s Goosebumps and 2019’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, Fear Street takes killers from different entries in the series and brings them under one roof. But Goosebumps and Scary Stories unified the threats with an “evil book whose killers come to life” plot device. In those films, the “evil book” trope felt like a lazy way of making us sympathize with the characters, the writers asking us to think, “how would you feel if those monsters came to life?” It’s not a bad idea, but it broke immersion rather than enforcing it.
Conversely, Fear Street knows we were already immersed in the books, and it’s a testament to the film that the witch’s curse feels like something that could happen in them, instead of outside them. It adds a layer to the terror and a life to the fictional town where it’s set, Shadyside.
It also adds stakes. The murders in Fear Street are a part of the characters’ history, not the fiction they read, making the killers greater threats. When a character gets an axe in their head or impaled through the chest, there’s no hopeful feeling that a magic book can undo that loss. Past victims can’t be saved, they can only motivate.
The town’s violent history also makes for a menacing tone. Any threat of violence, any act of aggression, registers the character as a potential killer. When Deena (Kiana Madeira) riles up other students, reinforcing a centuries long feud between Shadyside and nearby Sunnyvale, her closing calls for death don’t sound like hyperbole. They sound real, against her will, and she doesn’t even know it.
As strong as this menace is, equally strong is the romance that counteracts it. If anger leads to murder, responding to anger with love (as cheesy as that sounds) is as essential as ever, making Fear Street’s LGBT romance between Deena and Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) essential to the drama. When scenes like Sam’s Mom treating Deena horribly come up, or when Sam’s life is at stake and her sacrifice could save those around her, we think it’d be easy for Deena to just give up and deny how she feels. She comes close, and even when she affirms her feelings and fights for Sam, the film makes no promises that “the power of love” will save them.
There’s a long road ahead, and we don’t know what terrors await our heroes in the next two films (1978 releases July 9th, with the trilogy closer, 1666, releasing the week after). But this romance adds a nice dose of wholesomeness to this slasher, ensuring that the film’s charm isn’t restricted to over-the-top violence or references to other slashers. Those elements are indeed fun and essential, but they’re also bolstered by the core romance. As a result, the film has a timelessness that works with its throwback nature, making it a perfect introduction for younger fans to classic slashers.
Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is the first of a trilogy, with each entry going further back in time. It ends with a cliffhanger that I didn’t expect, and, just as the novels kept me on the edge of my seat as a kid, I eagerly await whatever direction this spooky story is heading.
Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is now streaming on Netflix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clZK2PqLWpI
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