Fear Street: 1994 (2021)

(Netflix Streaming, May 2022) If there’s a genre I’m not feeling nostalgic at all about, it’s the 1990s revival of the 1980s slasher genre: a terrible rip-off of an even worse movie subgenre that should be stomped back into its grave then covered with a load of concrete. But here we are, two decades later, about to re-engage with it as part of the Great Nostalgic Regurgitation of everything that’s come before. Fear Street, adapted from R. L. Stine’s YA horror series, at least has the intriguing distinction of being a more ambitious project than most, going for a story presented in a pre-written trilogy of films, each of them going back to a different era as part of a single story. (I was about to be appreciative of Netflix for allowing such storytelling experiments, but reading about the film’s production history clarifies that everything was supposed to be theatrically released before Netflix bought it all due to the COVID-19 theatrical closures.)  Alas, it takes only a few moments for the film to temper viewers’ expectations, with a bit of blunt high-concept (a tale of two small towns: Shadyside, the murder capital of the United States located right next to Sunnyvale, which has no discernible crime rate) that reveals a lot about where the series is headed and can only work for undemanding teenage audiences. Much of this 1994 instalment of Fear Street works on inertia, reusing 1990s neon nostalgia, the usual slasher plot template and teenage archetypes to reassure audiences on how they should be feeling. Writer-director Leigh Janiak is not interested in a stylistic pastiche: the filmmaking approach is transparently 2020s and so is the representativeness of its characters. I had to laugh when the main character was established as a lesbian, because in the modern pantheon of teen movies that essentially guarantees her virtue and her survival to the end of the series – we are (thankfully, but also schematically) a long, long way away from The Celluloid Closet here. Fear Street: 1994 is mediocre material all the way through: it’s only slightly better than most slashers in introducing a strong supernatural element and clearly having more in mind for the later instalments. I did like one of the characters (who sadly gets killed, and not nicely) and some of the production design gets a lot out of a modest budget. While the story could have ended thirty seconds prior to this first film’s end credits, there’s a lot of background material that could have been used for depth in other films but is here more likely to gain further significance in the follow-up films. I’m wondering how the conceit will be kept, though: Are we going to spend all of Fear Street 1978 in 1978, and all of Fear Street: 1666 in 1666? What’s the framing device? That, more than the issue of stopping the killing, is what interests me in this series.