Fear Street Part One: 1994, Fear Street Part Two: 1978, and Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (all released to Netflix in 2021) represent the creative union of writer/director Leigh Janiak and novelist R.L. Stine, on whose novels the films are based. The Fear Street Trilogy is a three pronged homage to three distinct horror films canons. The first film is a politically correct revision of Scream (1996) while the second installment attempts a pastiche of Friday The 13th (1980). The last film in the trilogy attempts to play into the en vogue folk horror genre complete with bad accents, historical inaccuracies and a general lack or narrative originality.
The trilogy is linked by the mystery of a Witch whose own homosexuality and the accompanying social ramifications (primarily homophobia) are mirrored by the experiences of protagonist Deena Johnson (Kiana Madeira). The problem with this is that the filmmakers seem unable to imagine a queer character with any real depth. In fact all the characters across all three films function more as political sign posts for political correctness rather than as human beings. When a character is denied a monologue regarding teenage depression, oppressed sexuality or domestic abuse they are reduced to fitting an archetypal mode.
Clearly a motivating factor in exploring different horror movie sub genres is to rewrite the sociological fabric of those narratives. But when the characters who inhabit that world and are tasked with such revisions fail to do anything more than simply represent a demographic in its most abstract it’s more than a little problematic. These characters who ought to be compelling manage to do little more in the realm of genre subversion than the queer coded characters in the films made during the eras depicted in The Fear Street Trilogy. The fact that Sleepaway Camp (1983), a film that’s nearly forty years old, does more to subvert the gendered roles of horror than The Fear Street Trilogy is embarrassing.
On the other hand, can one expect a film based upon the works of R.L. Stine to really be all that progressive or meaningful? Probably not. The Fear Street Trilogy has a number of terrible moments of ineptitude where characters reveal themselves only to be killed off a moment later (I’m thinking of Ryan Simpkins’ final scene). For Stine and Janiak the central metaphor of this ill fated franchise is that the town of Shadyside (where the films are set) is as much a metaphor for adolescence as the horror genre. The message is equally simple: white men in positions of authority are bad.
Perhaps it would have been easier to enjoy these films if other components besides the writing had shown some merit. Generally bad acting amongst the leads, ignorance of historical details (no one smokes in the nineties or seventies), and some silly special effects all conspire to make the shortcomings of the scripts all the more apparent. As pure escapism or progressive politicking The Fear Street Trilogy fails miserably. The only audience I could imagine enjoying these films would be horror fans with the lowest expectations and standards.
