FEAR STREET

I liked Netflix's FEAR STREET: 1994, the first of a trilogy of Fear St films. The second is set in 1978; the third in 1666. Gradually the origin of a witch monster and the evil that lurks beneath the town named Shadyside is revealed through the three films.

Virginia Woolf once accused Charles Dickens of pitching more characters onto the fire whenever he ran into a narrative dead end; and RL Stine, on whose Fear St books the trilogy is based, has a tendency to do the same. Can anyone recall which monsters appeared in the GOOSEBUMPS films? There are too many and they cancel themselves out in the memory. However, in FEAR STREET: 1994, Stine and the writer/director Leigh Janiak, limit themselves to only three killer-stalker monsters and one source-monster (the witch). This is a good thing.

The three killer-stalkers take the form of a skull-headed becloaked man (one of the teens refers to him as "Skeletor"), a sexy girl with a switchblade, and a man with a hessian sack on his head and an axe. Once the killers set off after our four teen heroes, in an effective series of set-pieces, the film falls into a familiar pattern. At one point, it felt like it could be part of THE STRANGERS franchise, which also shares three hunter-killers, one of whom is a man with a hessian sack on his head and who carries an axe...

That said, FEAR STREET does deliver the goods, partly because the four teens at the centre make it work. They are played by Kiana Madeira (excellent), Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr, and the great Fred Hechinger, who stood out so much for me in Paul Greengrass' NEWS OF THE WORLD. 

FEAR STREET is "knowing", though not as self-referential as, say, Kevin Williamson's SCREAM films, which it echoes. In spite of viewers needing to be aware of the the slasher horror genre from FRIDAY THE 13TH and THE BURNING up (1980 and 1981 respectively) in order to get where it is coming from, it feels like it is pitched squarely at the same age group as the teenage heroes. There are no adults to intervene in the horror games, and those who do feature (two cops) are there to be disbelieved or distrusted. Similarly, there are narrative logic holes that might not be permitted in a grown-up film. It's as though we are watching a tall tale told by an excited teenager, who slides over some of the facts for the sake of telling a better story. And in spite of the premise and of the heroes being scared witless, death doesn't really figure - characters are killed with nobody really seeming to miss them.

FEAR STREET: 1994 is recommended, though, and is plenty gory. I'm looking forward to watching the other two films.