Fear Street Part 1: 1994 (dir. Leigh Janiak, 2021) — Review

Netflix’s new adaptation of Fear Street brings serious muscle to jostle for a spot on the overcrowded nostalgia bandwagon. Based on the RL Stine teen horror books beloved by a generation, the film version is expertly tailored to the taste of audiences seeking 90s comfort without 90s values, with a liberal measure (in all senses of the word) of small-town lesbian angst and ethnic diversity alongside the traditional blood-spattered cheerleading outfits and hordes of the undead.

If the aesthetic commitment to the period weren’t convincing enough — from the mesh shirts and scrunchies to a soundtrack of punch-a-hole-in-the-drywall classics — the decision to make an entire Fear Street trilogy at once suggests that this is an elaborately calculated algorithm-friendly franchise. Final nail in the coffin: the Fear Street fake ‘VHS store’ opened in East London as a promotional tie-in.

With all this in mind, it’s astonishing that Fear Street: 1994 is actually quite enjoyable. Avoiding the ‘hello, fellow kids’ tone all too common with such corporate nostalgia trips, Leigh Janiak’s direction and script tenderly nod towards slasher classics and 20th-century Middle America without reducing the characters and plot to fill-the-blank exercises.

It’s 1994 in Shadyside, Ohio, a wonderland of dial-up internet, landlines, and AOL plagued not only by teenage ennui but by a local proclivity for bloody massacres by people who’ve ‘just snapped’; local teens jokingly attribute the slayings to the ghost of witch Sarah Fier, with a level of flippancy which renders the classic horror movie question of ‘why are you still here’ irrelevant within the first 15 minutes. After another mall massacre, local high school student Deena (Kiana Madeira) finds herself locked in a battle with the supernatural, alongside her Vicodin-slinging best friends, her nerdy younger brother, and her (gasp!) female ex.

Despite an early moment of back-patting where the film laboriously sets up Deena’s ex Sam and then reveals her as a girl, the central queer storyline is handled with a surprising degree of grace and conviction, which is really enhanced by Sam’s attempts to murder Deena after rising from the dead and being possessed by a witch. Crazy exes — they’re the same whichever way you swing.

The seat-edge suspense and fountains of gore, alongside the sprinklings of f-bombs dropped by the cast of rising Gen-Z stars, give the film a real sense of teenaged fun, capturing the spirit of both the slashers it pastiches and the books which inspired a generation of horror fans. The script neatly balances the parts where its stars flee screeching through a darkened hospital and where they try to navigate more typical growing up challenges, like their sexuality and opiate abuse. The second Fear Street — dropping in about a week — is an unexpectedly welcome prospect.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.