Trigger warning: Police brutality, assault, violence
A handsome, white police officer has a queer black teenager facedown in the mud. He leans over her, knife to the back of her throat and whispers in her ear, “They’re going to give me a fucking medal. They’re going to give me a medal and everyone will know your name. They’ll talk about the d*ke who murdered her girlfriend and all of her friends.” The scene is familiar. We see this story played out on the news all the time. In this instance, it is a scene from Fear Street: 1666, the third and final chapter in the series of horror movies that have dropped one per week for the past three weeks.
The first installment, Fear Street: 1994, drew comparisons to Stranger Things for its neon lit, generation appropriate costume and aesthetic as well as the soundtrack of juke box hits that played in the background. It was an ode to Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and all the 90’s era self-parodying horrors of the time. But what does not become apparent until the final installment, are the entirely original choices that director Leigh Janiak made in the writing of the trilogy.
Fear Street is set in the fictional town of Shadyside, a low income, disenfranchised town known for the brutal murders that occur ever decade or so. The citizens of Shadyside are given few opportunities to escape this town and rise above their rotting roots, and most simply give up trying. Next door to Shadyside is Sunnyvale, a wealthy, prospering town, supposedly blessed with good fortune. Sunnyvalers, outside spectators, and Shadysiders alike all believe that Shadyside must deserve its suffering, that there is something wrong with the inhabitants that makes bad things happen. It’s a common enough assumption.
Enter our protagonists: Simon (Fred Hechinger), the comic relief; Kate (Julia Rehwald), the bitchy cheerleader; Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr), the nerd; Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), the goody goody; and Deena (Kiana Madeira), the final girl. Except that Simon is also a genuinely kind and empathetic person who works two jobs to support his family. Kate is a cheerleader, a valedictorian, and a badass and deals drugs to pay for college. Josh is smart and sweet and has a huge crush on Kate that turns out to be reciprocated, and Sam used to live in Shadyside where she had a romance with Deena, our main protagonist.
Fear Street 1994 plays into classic horror tropes, only to ultimately subvert them. Four out of five of the main characters are given enthusiastically consensual sex scenes in the midst of the violence and three out of four of them ultimately survive to the end of the movie. After the climactic battle, when Kate and Simon don’t survive, they are blamed for their own deaths because of their low income, “undesirable” status. But Josh defends them, saying “I knew Kate and Simon, they were my friends. Simon was brave and kind. Kate was strong and sweet. I miss them.” The trope of the junkie comic relief characters being offed and then forgotten is prevalent both in film and in real life; but in the end, Fear Street does not forget about them. Their deaths create real loss.
The fact that our final girl Deena is a black, queer woman is not virtue signaling, nor is it forced diversity. It is a choice. An intersectional identity which is often used as collateral damage in movies (especially horror movies) and represents one of the most targeted identities in real life is given the role of the hero and the survivor in Fear Street and carries the bulk of the plot throughout all three movies. The dual role that Kiana Madeira is given in the series only strengthens the real life repercussions of the horror that follows our protagonists until the end of the story.
You see, there is a rumor that exists in Shadyside and Sunnyvale, that Shadyside is not only metaphorically, but literally cursed. Hundreds of years ago a witch hexed the town so that every few years she would possess an innocent victim and force them to kill people. This becomes a bit more likely when the dead killers from the past few centuries rise up from their graves and start hunting down Deena and her friends.
The second film, Fear Street: 1978 goes back in time to help untangle the mystery of Sarah Fier (Elizabeth Scoppel), the witch who supposedly cursed Shadyside back in 1666. In this installment we follow Ziggy Berman (Sadie Sink), her sister Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd) and a young Nick Goode, the friendly cop from 1994 played by Ashley Zuckerman as an adult and Ted Sutherland as a teenager. Even in 1978 he seems kind and willing to help, striking up a romance with Ziggy as they attempt to survive the terror that has befallen their summer camp a la Friday the 13th. Nick might be a Sunnyvale resident but he believes Ziggy about the curse and bravely helps protect her, ultimately saving her life in the end. I remember liking him even more in 1978 than I did in 1994.
Deena and her brother Josh come to believe that if they find Sarah Fier’s skeleton they might be able to end the curse. Instead Deena, and the audience as well, are brought back in time to 1666 and shown the story of what happened to Sarah Fier. The decision to populate 1666 with actors from both 1994 and 1978 is a good one because it imbues the new characters with the sympathy the audience has already built up for this cast. And the decision to cast Kiana Madeira as Sarah Fier in this flashback becomes even more important as her story unfolds.
There was a curse on Shadyside, named Union back in 1666. First the crops spoiled, then the well water was poisoned. Most terrifying though is what happened to the kindly Pastor Miller. The final straw that causes the witch hunt in Union is the Pastor who after gauging out his own eyes, then murders and gauges out the eyes of twelve children. Yeah, seriously, and that’s not even the goriest thing that happens in this series (let’s just say I’ll never look at a bread slicer the same way again.) After that the townsfolk are more than ready to believe that there is a witch among them, and they are more than ready to begin throwing young women under the metaphorical bus.
Sarah and Hannah Miller (also played by Olivia Scott Welch) the pastor’s daughter, fall in love and are seen kissing in the woods. This makes them a target for the bigoted townspeople. Sarah is left with one last ally, Solomon Goode, the ancestor of Nick Goode (also played by Ashley Zuckerman), who has lost both his wife and child and who is in love with Sarah. When it is revealed that Solomon is actually the witch and the originator of the curse on Shadyside, it throws both of the prior installments into a whole new and truly terrifying perspective.
Solomon Goode says that he made the deal with the devil because he felt that he deserved the good fortune that he had believed he would receive in America. He believes he is owed a good and easy life. And yes, it is sad that he lost his wife and child, but the sentiment that he is owed happiness at the expense of the lives and the happiness of others is what makes him a monster. Every death that occurs as a result of his actions feeds the curse with blood and so his fortune will grow as others suffer. The worst part is that he still sees himself as a victim in this situation. As it turns out Sarah Fier was actually the victim. The fact that it was a queer woman who was blamed for the actions of an entitled white man for hundreds of years echoes the demonization of minorities throughout history and makes this story even more tragic.
Solomon’s curse is ultimately carried out by every new generation of the Goode family for generations, including Nick in 1994. Sunnyvale and the Goode family grow prosperous while Shadyside and its citizens are condemned to lives of terror and tragedy. Just as rich and privileged members of society feed off of Queer BIPOC in our world. Deena faces off with Nick Goode and is able to end the curse as well as force Nick to confront all the pain he has caused, and in the moment that he sees the faces of his victims he does look appropriately terrified. But by then it’s too late. And in the real world, we know that those in power rarely regret their actions even faced with the consequences. We know it because we see the faces of the victims of injustice all over the news and on social media, and there is almost never a true change in behavior. Our monsters continue to feast on the blood their sacrifices, and they never say they are sorry.
“The truth will come out. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But it will. The truth shall be your curse. I will shadow you for eternity. I will follow you forever. And everything you take and everyone you harm, you will feel the grip of my hand. I will show them what you’ve done. I will never let you go.” This is Sarah’s final speech to Solomon right before she is hanged. When Deena kills Nick, he sees her as Sarah, and truly it is her influence that eventually stops him and saves Shadyside. The fact that the surviving characters include three black people and two queer people is a powerful statement both realistically and cinematically. By this point, nearly every trope we have been set up to believe has been broken. The POC in the cast are not used as collateral. The queer relationship is not doomed. The kindly white police officer is a monster, and the witch is an innocent. It is interesting to consider who trusts Officer Nick Goode from the beginning and who is immediately suspicious of him. I am a white woman, and I Iiked Nick at first; that’s not to say that most BIPOC might see him differently from the very beginning. Because the truth is, in our world, the queer woman is rarely the villain, true evil is born from white male entitlement. The men who rape multiple women throughout their lives and then are elected president. The cops who get away not only with the murder of minorities, but who then are able to implicate minorities and jail them for crimes they have not even committed. Politicians who blamed the AIDS crisis on the very people who were most impacted by the virus. I don’t know whether to mourn that Fear Street will never get the recognition it deserves or be thankful that horror is still niche enough to tell these sorts of stories.
The monsters in our world have historically gotten away with evil, and they have not been faced with either guilt or regret. But that is beginning to change. Because these days, truth is more difficult than ever to cover up. Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd over a year ago, is now in prison. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted as a sex offender after raping dozens of women. But Chauvin will only be in prison for 22 years or less and the men who helped and benefited from Epstein are mostly walking free. There are still plenty of men with less power, with less well known names who are getting away with this sort of thing every single day. But we know what they have done, we know it and now we can share it with the world. They will not get away with it anymore. And we will never let them go.