“Fear Street” and the Illusions of Community

Promo posters from Netflix's Fear Street trilogy

Every few years, somebody in the generic Back East city of Shadyside snaps and goes berserk, leaving a trail of bloody dead. Deena and Sam, teenagers struggling to express their same-sex romance in judgemental 1994, consider themselves lucky survivors of the latest onslaught. Then, to their horror, dozens of past psycho killers return from the grave and target our heroines. Seems they’ve broken the rules of the slasher-movie universe.

Leigh Janiak’s feature trilogy, originally intended for cinematic release but probably better suited to streaming viewing, leaves me with conflicting reactions. On one hand, Janiak treats her source material with great respect. Our characters are self-aware enough to realize they’re slasher-pic characters, and respond accordingly. Where lesser writer-directors might’ve reduced this self-awareness to jokey camp, Janiak treats her characters’ struggles and fears with complete seriousness.

On the other hand, Janiak misses a powerful opportunity. In Part One, Deena and Sam think their trauma is a one-off, that the repeated violence that shakes Shadyside a couple of times per generation is something that just happens; across parts Two and Three, they discover their torment is systemic, that violence and insanity are simply endemic in Shadyside. Which is great, except that Janiak misses what that system is.

I grew up with monsters like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger as cultural touchstones: moral blank slates who killed teenagers because that’s simply what they did. In today’s horror movie landscape, where cerebral content like Get Out, A Quiet Place, and Hereditary have become runaway critical darlings, deliberately throwing back to outdated slasher tropes seems retrogressive. The genre has moved away from inexplicably violent, but morally vacant, slashers.

Shadyside’s development across three movies shows this moral vacancy is illusory. What seems, to Deena and Sam in Part One like an isolated incident of freak insanity, gets proved in Part Two to reflect a pattern that precedes their birth. In Part Three, we learn how that pattern dates to Shadyside’s colonial-era foundations. As someone writing a novel about history and inherited guilt, I like what Janiak has attempted here.

Except that, throughout, Janiak’s interconnected world turns on individuals. Psycho killers who bear a not-coincidental resemblance to Jason, Michael Myers, Norman Bates, and Leatherface, are presented as atomized individuals who go berserk and kill people. Violence starts from nowhere, and ends when the individual dies, a death which, in slasher movie tradition, usually takes seven or eight tries. Violence may paralyze Shadyside, but it starts and ends abruptly.

The Skullface Killer, one of Fear Street’s willfully self-referential monsters

Not that it has no origin. Throughout the trilogy, Deena and Sam seek to exorcise the spirit of Sarah Fier, a colonial woman hanged for witchcraft. Sarah’s curse bifurcates the community into poor, hopeless Shadyside, where violence simply happens occasionally, and Sunnyvale, the safest, least violent town in America. Our heroines believe Sarah Fier’s mythology so absolutely, that veteran audiences know everything they believe will be upended by Act III.

When Act III happened to occur in Shadyside’s English colonial past, I really expected we’d see something about America’s original sins. Throughout this trilogy, Shadyside proves remarkably immune to certain stereotypes: racism scarcely exists, religion is present but ancillary, and sexual trauma, that hallmark of teenage horror, never gets mentioned. (Deena and Sam catch grief as lesbians, but their mixed-race relationship goes completely unremarked.)

Colonial Shadyside stands on stolen Indian land, yet beyond an orphaned reference to “the natives,” Native Americans don’t appear. We see Black people strolling the unpaved streets and arguing in the meeting house, but no mention of slavery. We see the ways colonial Shadyside bequeathed its character to the present, as small towns often do, but racism, Native genocide, and slavery don’t exist. Homophobia is Shadyside’s only structural vice.

The trilogy demonstrates how small towns with long histories develop characters that outlive their founders, something anybody who’s lived in farm country can attest. But that character ultimately doesn’t involve anything definite. Evil happens over and over, yet always arises from some individual. Even in the M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist ending, we witness our protagonists’ belief in evil individuals subverted… then dumped onto another mere individual.

Don’t misunderstand me. Communities are comprised of individuals, and individuals can resist the system, even transform it. But history and experience teach that this happens rarely; towns, companies, and organizations develop communal habits, and most people go along to get along. I thought Janiak would acknowledge this, when habits of spontaneous, shocking violence characterize life in Shadyside. But nope, in the end, evil arises from bad people. It’s a missed opportunity.