Review: Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)

 Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, drug content, language and some sexual content

Score: 3 out of 5

While Goosebumps may have made him a horror icon for generations of children who grew up with his kid-friendly horror novellas, real '90s kids also know R. L. Stine as the creator of the Fear Street series and as one of the leading writers for Scholastic's Point Horror imprint. Predating the likes of Scream and The Craft, the popularity of Stine's books and others like them throughout the '90s demonstrated that there was still a latent demand for teen horror even as the slasher boom of the '80s eventually ate its own tail, and in particular lent some credence to Carol J. Clover's observation in Men, Women, and Chain Saws that women were drawn to horror movies, even with all their problems when it came to women, by their relative abundance of capable female protagonists. I believe that their success anticipated the teen horror boom of the late '90s, and given that, going by my observations in Barnes & Noble, YA horror literature has been making a comeback, I've been expecting a teen horror revival for quite a while, especially with shows like Riverdale and Stranger Things priming the pump. As such, I was not at all surprised when a Fear Street movie was announced -- or rather, a Fear Street trilogy, in keeping with the multi-book stories that Stine often wrote, premiering on Netflix over the span of three weeks in July.

And overall, I was pretty impressed by this one. It may not have been fully authentic to its early-mid '90s setting, and it may not have done much more than recycle old tropes with a paint job that was equal-parts new-school and retro, but I bought it as recapturing the feel of that decade's horror movies, while also telling its own compelling story with a cast of surprisingly likable characters and a willingness to get a lot darker and meaner than I expected going in. It is pure popcorn horror cheez-whiz, but I enjoyed myself regardless and found myself eagerly anticipating the next two films, and I heartily recommend this to both nostalgic horror fans and teenagers just getting into it.

The year is 1994, a fact that is reinforced with the needle drop (the first of many) of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" blaring over images of a neon-lit shopping mall closing up for the night as a teenage girl works the checkout counter at a B. Dalton bookstore. She and several others are murdered by her "deranged" boyfriend in an opening scene that gives off strong "Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker" energy, in what is hardly the first such tragedy to afflict the town of Shadyside, Ohio, which has been plagued for years by a long string of gruesome, high-profile murder sprees that have earned it a reputation as the murder capital of America. In this pre-Columbine, pre-Parkland world of Gen-X cynicism, the teenagers treat it as a joke and try to get on with their lives. Deena is in a secret lesbian relationship with Sam, who moved to the wealthy neighboring town of Sunnyvale and became a cheerleader, while her brother Josh is a true crime nerd obsessed with his hometown's long legacy of murder, convinced that it's all connected to the murder of an accused witch named Sarah Fier in 1666 and that her ghost has been tormenting the town for centuries, possessing people to kill. It goes without saying that there is a witch, as Deena, Sam, and her friends Simon and Kate all find out after a football game between their two towns leads to a prank that ends in a car crash. For whatever reason, the ghosts of various maniacs from Shadyside's shady history, including the mall killer, are now stalking them, and our protagonists must find out why.

This film did such a good job getting me invested in its characters that I was genuinely surprise not only when they started dying, but at how gruesome the deaths got. Despite an R rating that felt plenty earned, I was expecting this film to go the Stranger Things route with its main cast, keeping the death to the supporting players and letting them live to see tomorrow. Deena and Sam's relationship felt authentically rocky in a way that did not flatter Deena, a fact that the film wisely recognized, especially as it refused to fully gloss over the more prevalent homophobia of the '90s and how Sam thus had legitimate concerns about coming out of the closet. In the early going, Sam is portrayed unequivocally as the voice of reason who Deena feels "betrayed" her for reasons outside her control (namely, moving away to a nicer town), and a lot of Deena's arc concerns her having to get over herself and accept Sam for who she is. Simon is a nerd, but one who's more than happy to be a nerd, while Kate is an overachiever who's turned to selling drugs to make enough money to one day leave her run-down dump of a hometown. Even Josh, the kid who gets comparatively the least development, still got a lot to do with his knowledge of the crimes in Shadyside's history. If I had any problem with the characterization, it's that Deena and Sam's relationship troubles seem to resolve themselves too easily, with early scenes indicating a deeper wedge than the events of one film, even one involving surviving a killing spree, could fully heal. That being said, the rest of the film did get me invested in the idea that they cared about each other.

Already, this film has a leg-up on many of its teen horror inspirations by crafting characters who I actually did not want to die, meaning that, when it became clear that they were in genuine peril, I got scared for them, and not just because this film did not play around when it came to gore. There is at least one kill here involving a bread slicer that is going to be remembered as a standout simply for how gnarly it gets. The characters do make some pretty dumb decisions, with one big one in particular that Deena makes concerning the fate of Sam sticking out in my mind, but the film lulling me into believing that they had plot armor meant that it was only after the bodies started hitting the floor that I recognized in hindsight how stupid they were. If a horror movie can, even temporarily, trick me into thinking that a really dumb idea that will get people killed is actually pretty smart, that counts as a win -- and an indication that I probably wouldn't last as long in a horror movie as I think I will. (I remember almost falling for the obvious trap in Until Dawn where you hear a strange noise in a dark cave and have the option to investigate it.) When it comes to the killers themselves, however, it's mostly horror movie boilerplate. Only Ruby Lane, the ghost with the retro '50s girl motif, really stood out as particularly interesting from a creative standpoint, while the Camp Nightwing and Skullmask killers were both rather conventional (though the former, being the main killer in the upcoming second film, will probably get a bit more development) and Sarah Fier was a hodgepodge of horror cliches about witches and ghosts who wasn't much of a character in her own right. The atmosphere also wasn't particularly scary, feeling more like a beefier episode of Riverdale than anything and relying mainly on gory special effects rather than tension. The attempts to drive home to viewers the fact that the film is set in the '90s were cool at first, but eventually began to wear out their welcome and feel like overcompensation, especially with some of the goofs, from more than one needle drop of a song from after 1994 to the contrived explanation they give for how Josh is using dial-up internet and Deena is on the phone at the same time ('90s kids will remember the pain of a tied-up phone line).

The Bottom Line

Fear Street Part One: 1994 isn't quite the '90s version of Stranger Things that it wanted to be, but its own merits as a slasher helped elevate it, and got me more than interested in the forthcoming sequels. If you've got Netflix and wanna watch a good "dead teenager movie", check it out.