Horror Movies, Community, and the Power of Stories

Sisters Cindy and Ziggy face off, in Act One of Fear Street Part 2

Near the beginning of the second installment in Netflix’s Fear Street teenage horror trilogy, principal characters Ziggy Berman (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) and her goody two-shoes sister Cindy (relative unknown Emily Rudd) have a quarrel. Cindy, who has worked hard, gained some level of respectability, and hopes to someday attend college, sees Ziggy as a malcontent and heel-dragger. Ziggy sees Cindy as a sell-out. We’re all trapped, Ziggy reminds her sister, by the witch’s curse.

Watching this exchange the first time, I had no problem. The entire Fear Street trilogy deals with the ways community patterns, whether healthy or dysfunctional, repeat themselves across generations, and the question of whether individuals can break the cycles of inheritance. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the Small Town America myth, pitting the bucolic town of Sunnyvale against the rusticating despair of Shadyside. The “witch’s curse” myth simply symbolizes that dismal inheritance.

Then, the personality behind the widely watched YouTube channel “Scaredy Cats” weighed in. Like me, series host Matt (who also goes by Mildred) views art and literature through a political and economic lens. Mildred sees Ziggy and Cindy’s argument as a nihilistic surrender to capitalist forces that want to keep the working class beholden; Ziggy’s claim that some centuries-old disembodied witch tale holds Shadyside back, is emblematic of the ways workers internalize a poverty narrative.

I initially balked at Matt’s characterization. How dare this big-city interloper, an urbane media creator from Toronto, Ontario (of all places), tell me how to interpret small-town American malaise! Ziggy and Cindy’s Manichaean dichotomy perfectly describes my experience with small and small-ish American towns, where some people try to escape by working hard, “improving” themselves, and following the rules; while others try to drag the ambitious down with mockery, derision, and accusations of rank disloyalty.

On further consideration, though, I realized Mildred may be partly correct. Ziggy has internalized a colonial campfire boogeyman narrative of pessimistic resignation, while Cindy has internalized a modernist, cheerful narrative of success through conformity. In this movie, narratives don’t just explain events, they create identity. Which, thinking about it, is essentially what much American rah-rah boosterism does: it aligns individuals with whichever story makes them most comfortable with the circumstances capitalism makes available to them.

About the time Cindy and Ziggy quarrel about individual identities, their doomed summer camp prepares for an annual tradition, the Color War. Campers from Sunnyvale battle campers from Shadyside in an elaborate capture-the-flag which, apparently, Sunnyvale has won for forty consecutive years. Calling it the “Color War” makes it sound racial, which it isn’t (both communities are essentially integrated), except yes it is. Both camps muster enthusiasm with songs and speeches “othering” the opposing camp.

Watching these adolescent war conclaves, I couldn’t help remembering the stories used in small Nebraska towns where I’ve lived for thirty years. Towns, schools, and workplaces constantly encourage local loyalty through tales of cowboys, sodbusters, and the Oregon Trail, stories of supposed ancestral persistence, often stripped of real history. By contrast, capitalism, higher ed, and mass media tempt youth with narratives of shiny modernist counter-conformity, narratives that often involve walking away from your hometown forever.

Stories unify groups, while also making opportunities available to individuals—and, importantly, also closing other opportunities. People who want to escape small-town life have to choose how they’ll achieve that, which forecloses the chance to find the niche where they’ll successfully serve their community. Likewise, those who have loyalty to their community, choose careers and family paths that make moving out insuperably difficult, ensuring they’ll stay put forever. Just remember, you can’t serve two masters.

In the movie’s culmination, Ziggy and Cindy, having overtaken an axe-wielding maniac to find each other, both reject their internalized narratives. Cindy realizes her devotion to “escaping” Shadyside blinds her to local responsibilities, while Ziggy realizes she’s valued her community over the people in it. Both of them have, temporarily, transcended the narratives they once accepted unquestioningly. Then the slasher returns and, without a guiding narrative for their actions, they both wind up dead. (-ish.)

So yeah, Matt’s actually correct, these narratives—Ziggy’s inherited narrative, and Cindy’s imposed one—are artificial and constricting. But, like money or race, the fact they’re artificial doesn’t make them any less real. American small towns tend to stay rich or poor, conservative or progressive, healthy or dysfunctional, across several generations. And they stay this way because of the stories their people tell each other. This, I believe, is the central message of Fear Street.

See Also:
Fear Street and the Illusions of Community