Bright Lights, Big Murder: A Review of Fear Street Part One: 1994

 

Review (Light Spoilers)

            While the question of quality can certainly be asked of a film in any genre, horror feels like one where exactly what you’re getting from a given piece of media can vary incredibly wildly. Because horror is all about eliciting negative feelings anyway and since horror also breaks down into a wide variety of sub-genres and areas of focus, choosing a film at random to watch can be a real bad time. Maybe you like paranormal stuff but can’t stand blood and guts, or maybe you hate the modern, creeping, slow “artsy” horror but love schlocky excess. Maybe found footage makes you physically ill (and bored). I don’t doubt that there are horror fanatics out there who love or can at least stomach it all and will readily dive into whatever, but I don’t generally just pick horror films out of a hat, while, say, scrolling Netflix, for instance.

            Having the recognizable, maybe nostalgic Fear Street branding immediately makes Netflix’s recent horror event trilogy stand out from the pack of ambiguous one- or two-word titles fronting films of God-only-knows-what sub-genre and quality. On the other hand, the question of quality remains. The trailers, while attention-grabbing, definitely feel somewhat “epic” in tone, and the highest-profile horror movie in recent memory with that tone to its trailer was It Chapter Two (2019), which proved to be not all that scary or entertaining as it plodded through its 170-minute, epic runtime. Not only that, but there’s Netflix’s whole, specific track record to take into consideration. Consider all those unknown, surprise titles floating around in the catalog. They add heft to the library and, presumably, keep people on the service and watching, but how many come with actual prestige? How many are actually worth watching when you set aside boredom, ease of access, and the sunk cost fallacy? “Well, here I am on a Friday night during the pandemic, with a dedicated Netflix button on my remote, and I’ve already paid for the subscription—might as well see what’s there…” While the three Fear Street films got more marketing attention than a lot of Netflix-involved productions that you can find randomly by scrolling through the service, I wouldn’t blame anyone for being dubious about their quality, though it helps somewhat if you dig into their history since it turns out Netflix is just the distributor.

            Finally, there was undeniably something very cynical-feeling—nakedly capitalistic, even… uncaring-seeming—about the whole framing by Netflix of the Fear Street films as a sort of horror event stretched over three weeks. It feels unconfident in a way, like they were generating false hype by making this marketing move and the individual films might all be bad. Rather than letting interest build and word-of-mouth spread over time, you get this very quick, lightning-strike of a release schedule. If the movies actually disappeared after a short time period, it would almost make more sense as seasonal content like what you would see in a lot of “live service” video games: See it now when all your friends do or miss out! It feels false to me, sort of like how DC tried to speed run the sort of success Marvel has enjoyed with their long game of cinematic releases and crossovers but failed stupendously because they wanted Avengers-level excitement when they weren’t willing to commit to the required years of build-up.

You can imagine genuine hype for a trilogy that people care about greatly—like The Lord of the Rings—building to massive levels as each successive release comes out and you eventually arrive, as an audience (as a community with an investment strengthened over time) at the end of a journey that has occupied a bit of your life for years. The Fear Street trilogy tries to communicate an epic scope in a way that just doesn’t feel genuine when you consider that they all came out back-to-back over three weeks in the same year. The original distribution plan—before Netflix’s involvement, back when the trilogy was going to have a normal theatrical release before the pandemic and before Disney acquired the worthwhile parts of the Fox media empire—was only going to be slightly more drawn out: at three months instead of three weeks.

            To sum up, then, the circumstances surrounding Fear Street Part One: 1994 raise some reasonable questions about quality. Is this movie actually worth seeing?

            In a word? Yes—if you like slasher movies and don’t mind the teen melodrama. Maybe that last bit is even a hook if you like the source material.

I haven’t actually read that many of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books—just the 2014 installment, Party Games—so I can’t offer many opinions about how true the films are to the spirit and content of the books. My impression is that 1994 is a lot more openly vulgar, sexual, and grotesque than Party Games at least. The movie is rated R and looks, sounds, and feels it. Even the teen drama doesn’t cause it to spill over into goofy territory. This isn’t Riverdale (thankfully), though when the film is talking very seriously about the economic ruin and danger of “Shadyside” and its prosperous twin “Sunnyvale,” I definitely did start having CW network flashbacks. Thankfully, the inherently goofy town names aren’t bandied about quite as much as the movie goes on.

            Without spoilers, I would say that Fear Street Part One is very competent in all aspects and rises above just competence in some select areas. The shot composition and editing are sometimes explicitly creative, for example—a lot better than I expected and more interesting at points than better (overall) films. I do also think 1994 is a good slasher film specifically. It’s less outright scary and more so just very tense and sometimes bloody, though it doesn’t linger too long on any of the gore or really show anything too horrifying in great detail. This will be a plus for viewers who can stand a fair bit of blood but don’t like things to get too extreme. The IMDb parents’ guide for the movie actually makes it sound more gruesome than it is, in fact. The violence doesn’t particularly “pop” in the film in the way that you might expect from those text descriptions isolated from the action. There is a lot of blood and some rare, more extreme gore, but it all passes by very quickly. A lot of sequences take place in low lighting as well, which helps obscure things further. The one creative and most extreme kill is saved for the final sequence in a grocery store, and you can see it coming reasonably far in advance. The movie can be startling at times but doesn’t really rely on jump scares, which gets it bonus points from me. As I said, it’s not a terrible pick for someone who doesn’t mind horror but can also only take so much.

On the other hand, though, the actual murder is a bit unsatisfying if you’re into the genre. Slashers need creative kills to stand out, and this movie glosses over the violence too much in that regard. 1994 settles for a lot of stabbing and literal slashing but doesn’t seem particularly creative with its choice of weapons or its methods of dispatching its victims. The violence that is here isn’t gruesome or stylish enough to distinguish itself either—apart from perhaps that one kill. The killers themselves are visually reminiscent of slasher murderers past and aren’t striking enough in their designs to anchor the film. Since there are multiple of them as well, no one killer gets to really shine in terms of personality.

            The narrative of the movie suffers a bit as well from being the first film of three. There are plot elements that clearly won’t be resolved here, for example, but the more annoying quirk is how the movie actually concludes with the words “to be continued,” followed by what is essentially a trailer for the second installment. I would have liked for the film to be a bit more conclusive in its own right or at least not jam the sequel into its viewers’ eyes immediately. They could have done the now-standard franchise movie thing of putting the hook for the sequel in the middle or at the end of the credits, but since Netflix’s service tries to skip credits by default, I guess they were worried no one would see it. Of course, this is assuming any changes were made to the films specifically for a Netflix release given that the original plan was a theatrical release by 21st Century Fox. If nothing changed, it’s still a particularly weird design choice for a film releasing conventionally in theaters and a weirdly appropriate (even prescient) one given how it ended up on Netflix in the end.

To return to positives, however, I thought the story of the film—both what resolves itself and what doesn’t—was solid. The script and acting are both good, and when someone from the main cast did die, I felt for them. This was a surprise since I don’t consider the characters all that obviously sympathetic or interesting, but the movie must have done something (or maybe just enough) right to get me invested. There are some genuinely creative quirks to the story/lore as well that I can’t describe without spoiling them, so I’ll just say here that, as much as the kills might be pedestrian, the film does find ways to make its take on the basic slasher premise interesting.

            Aesthetically, Fear Street is a bit less remarkable. It has some striking scenes using “bisexual lighting,” but as much as I still appreciate how surreal and colorful the mixture is, it’s become a meme for a reason. It’s played out—time to find a new approach. That particular usage of color also muddies the 90s feel of the film, which doesn’t really feel very 90s to me. It relies on extremely obvious superficial touches like the technology (cassette tapes, for example) and specific licensed music to communicate the year, and I’m not sure that there’s any real reason it couldn’t have just been set in the current time period, outside perhaps the way that the ubiquity of cell phones and (likely) tighter security could have made certain plot beats harder to arrive at logically, though it’s not like a movie like this is ever really beyond the need for suspension of disbelief anyway. Returning to the licensed music for a moment, 1994 over-indulges early on to the point that it almost lost me. It goes through around three different licensed songs in what feels like less than two or three minutes at one point. It either lightened up as the movie progressed, or I got invested enough that I didn’t notice it as much. It still could have used its actual score more effectively (at least early on) rather than trying to take a shortcut to building pathos and establishing setting via song.

            Ultimately, the thing about slasher films is that they don’t necessarily need to be “good.” They need to be a bit thrilling, a bit gory, a bit sexy, and can definitely be goofy (intentionally or not). You don’t sit down to watch a slasher film expecting to use only the edge of your seat or to go to bed that night with the lights on. A slasher is a movie you watch with a beer and maybe some friends so that you can hoot and holler at it a bit. In that sense, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is successful. It has its weak points, but it’s technically much more competent and a lot less run-of-the-mill than you might expect. Even though it’s a teen drama, I didn’t find those elements suffocating or overbearing. It feels like it gets the right amount of human drama and bickering to pair with the supernatural, violent menace. It’s more extreme than I initially expected when I thought about a Fear Street movie and what that might look like (and be rated), but it’s also not stomach-turning enough to be completely hostile to more sensitive viewers. I had a good time watching it overall. 

 

Further Thoughts (Heavy Spoilers)

            There are some things about Fear Street Part One: 1994 that I want to focus on in greater detail and specificity here.

            First, there’s what I consider to be the film’s biggest positive and which elevates it considerably in my mind: the reveal that the killers only want one person’s blood and aren’t interested in murdering anyone else. It’s not a twist I remember seeing before, though it could absolutely have come from somewhere else. It makes for an interesting dynamic where most of the main cast are completely safe from death unless they have some of Sam’s (Olivia Scott Welch) blood on them or are actively between her and the killers, which leads to some good interpersonal drama and some creative uses of the blood as bait. I was going to say that this twist was nicely foreshadowed and built up to with how the killers initially seem interested in everyone, only for us to learn that each of those people had some of Sam’s blood nearby, but then I remembered the murders at the hospital. I’m assuming those people didn’t have Sam’s blood on them, so they shouldn’t have died. I guess you could make the argument that they were in the killer’s way, but I don’t think they were any more “in the way” than the main teens themselves are when they’re standing outside the bathroom at the school waiting for the blood trails to lure the killers into their trap. The rules might be a bit fuzzy. That realization definitely lessened how positively I felt about this twist, but it’s still an interesting idea.

            A second big positive and interesting idea is how the group plans to kill and then revive Sam to exercise what feels like a loophole in the witch’s curse. It’s interesting enough when left at just that, but the idea of intentionally inducing an overdose adds a grisly twist and also makes clear the true value of the film’s abiding focus on drugs and drug-dealing which, before, seemed like just some window-dressing meant to drive home how sketchy of a place Shadyside could be. That Deena (Kiana Madeira), Sam’s love interest, has to try to stuff the second round of pills into her mouth as she becomes unsteady and a bit out of it after round one is a nasty little touch. That Deena then has to drown Sam when the pill plan goes awry is great as well. These moments probably could have been rendered more viscerally if the film was more interested in making viewers feel a bit sick, but they’re still conceptually inventive and a little disturbing. They’re good inclusions.

            Speaking of disturbing, Kate’s (Julia Rehwald) death in the bread slicer was genuinely kind of startling and upsetting. I remembered IMDb using masculine pronouns in their description of the victim of this death, but I think I just misremembered. I was a little surprised that I felt bad for her since this is a slasher movie and since none of the characters are actually that compelling, but I wondered how many would actually even die. From what I remember of Party Games, there were more suggested, supposed deaths than there were actual deaths. I did also note afterward that Kate’s face was conveniently covered by cake so that the one close-up of the aftermath wasn’t as nasty as it could have been. It’s always interesting to watch bloody movies and see where they pull their punches. You might feel like everything’s on the table right up until it isn’t, and it’s kind of odd-feeling to encounter that limit. I can’t remember the specific moment that I found it watching one of the more recent Texas Chainsaw movies a few years ago, but it was an interesting moment when I realized that the movie had gone as far as it could and had to pull back. It takes you out of the horror experience a bit, but it’s also kind of fascinating from a craft perspective.

            I don’t like to nitpick movies excessively since suspension of disbelief is a necessary part of engaging with most storytelling media, but the fact that the Shadyside athletic bus driver was just letting students riot in the aisles and even open the emergency exit in the first place—regardless of whether they were going to chuck a bucket of sports drink at a car behind them—was just a bit hard to believe. At the same time, I don’t entirely disbelieve it because I get that the movie takes place in that sort of heightened alternate reality where teen conflicts are given priority by the universe. Simon (Fred Hechinger) just casually being in and later exiting the girls’ bathroom during school feels similar. It’s like the mess of the school as well. It’s unrealistic but makes sense in the heightened way that it’s meant to communicate that the place is a dump. The fake-out with a kid using an actual, literal knife to carve “RIP” into a victim’s locker feels pretty Riverdale-adjacent, though. I could easily see the balance potentially tipping in the next film without care and turning the whole thing extremely goofy.

            Finally, the movie flirts with some issues and ideas it doesn’t really have the space or capacity for but that are probably still good inclusions that add texture to the slasher setup in worthwhile ways. The idea of a severely disadvantaged town and its disproportionately rich neighbor next door is A) clearly setting up some sort of supernatural twist to come but B) still has some real-world resonance. That Sam is a white girl fleeing to the rich side from her ex-girlfriend, who seems to be a woman of color, on the poor side is pretty loaded. Sam is either bi or willing to be in a straight relationship to avoid being open with the world about loving Deena, who isn’t white or rich and refuses to try to hide her sexual identity. The way that these elements of identity overlap means that the film gets to look smart for juggling several different balls that happen to arc through the air in similar ways. This is to say that, at the end of the movie, when Sam intentionally kisses Deena so that her (Sam’s) mother can see, she’s kissing someone who is gay, poor, and a person of color. And the mother’s consternation could be a result of any one (or multiple or all) of those things. The execution could be seen as lazy or cowardly as well since it means that the movie doesn’t actually have to talk about the more uncomfortable issues—probably racism and homophobia—openly since they get subsumed by the focus on classism most of the time. This works out well for 1994 since it gets to do multiple things at once with minimal effort, but it could possibly have done more.

Of course, a movie that’s principally about supernatural murderers conjured by a witch to chase teenagers with a knife, a razor, and an axe can probably only do so much of substance with those elements, and it’s always a sticky situation putting this sort of representation into horror movies since, inevitably, you run into the issue of depicting marginalized people getting chopped up in a product that’s going to be consumed by a very large audience, some of whom are probably going to like it at least in part because they don’t like those sorts of people. If the film’s depiction is particularly gory or it revels in suffering, then you also risk alienating the members of the audience who belong to those groups as well. It’s not that horror stories shouldn’t be diverse—just that it’s still a rarity and that any attempt is going to come under more scrutiny and be more fraught for being the exception. And since we don’t tend to get mainstream stories about people of color and LGBT people that aren’t stories focused on mistreatment and pain (however realistic), I wonder about how it feels to see them in horror stories where mistreatment and pain are all but guaranteed and likely to be excessive.

Of course, as I’m saying all this, I’m dancing around the fact that the members of the cast with the marginalized identities actually survive in this movie, which raises questions about whether that was intentional or accidental. In either case, it probably has reactionaries somewhere crying about how the movie was made by “SJWs” and “shoved ‘identity politics’ down their throats.” Somewhere, someone is writing about how they used to love Fear Street, but the filmmakers had to put “politics” into it and completely ruin this person’s childhood. Since the movie doesn’t kill these characters, though, I guess it gets some credit for (possibly) having a little sensitivity and (maybe intentionally) bucking the trend.