I watched Fear Street Part One: 1994, Fear Street Part Two: 1978, and Fear Street Part Three: 1666, and this is my review of all 3 movies. I write movie reviews mostly as reminders to myself that I've seen a movie, so there's no serious critique happening here. This post does contain spoilers.
Cutting to the chase: The Fear Street series is a pretty supernatural slasher trilogy, with a strong post-modern awareness of what makes horror movies effective. I think it achieves its goal to tell a horror saga essentially in reverse order, and it got me pondering the strengths and weaknesses of post-modern art.
The plot's pretty simple. A group of high school kids are being killed by a slasher that's supposed to be dead. Is it a curse from long ago? And if it is a curse, how can the high schoolers break the curse and survive?
The first movie is set in 1994 and introduces a cast of high school students, most of whom are doomed to grisly death. The second movie jumps back to 1978 to relay the killing spree to a series of murders that happened at a nearby summer camp. The third movie jumps even farther back to 1666 to reveal the origin of the curse that's causing all the trouble in 1994.
If you're a horror fan, then you've almost certainly already got about a dozen instances of prior art for this premise. Obviously the whole Friday the 13th series is reference material for the masked slasher (and indeed, at one point the slasher is wearing a sackcloth over his head, as Jason did in the early movies before finding the hockey mask.) There's Evil Dead for possessed killers. There are movies about witch's curses, and doomed high schools, and summer camps. This is a deliberate reworking of those old traditions, but done with foresight we all sometimes wish filmmakers had in hindsight.
And it works pretty well. I have to admit that I became less invested in the story the farther back in time we traveled. It's not for lack of trying on the movie's part. Parts 2 and 3 are each bookended with the "current" (fictional 1994) storyline, in which the survivors from part 1 use the information they just gained from the flashback to improve their situation. That's not much to hang your emotions on though, and by the third movie I didn't much care whether the survivors stayed alive, whether the possessed girl got un-possessed, or whether the veil got lifted from Shadyside. In other words, I don't know how well the movies work as a series, but as individual movies I think they're spot on.
Among post-modern cinema are movies that re-implement the things old movies tried to do but (arguably) failed. No matter how much you love Friday the 13th, for instance, you might concede that the story gets pretty muddled. No matter how much you love Star Wars, it's pretty obvious that the prequels look like they were made (and are set) after the originals. And so on. Old movies tried stuff, but they were often pioneering that stuff, and so our memories of what old movies achieved are often better than what the movies actually were.
Post-modern cinema has the advantage of being able to look back at a movie series, or an entire genre, and learn from both success and failure. Post-modern cinema can take all the best visual and storytelling "vocabulary" from old movies, and use them in a highly focused and deliberate story.
I like post-modern cinema, at least in theory. The 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th was a great movie and probably an improvement on the original. The Star Wars sequels were, I guess, better than the prequels. I wanted to love the Star Trek reboots (but did not, to be clear.) The more examples of post-modern cinema I think of, the fewer I can find that I actually enjoyed.
Happily, the Fear Street trilogy is post-modernism that works. It knows exactly the story it wants to tell, and knew it all in advance. Everything in the story fits together. There are no weird timeline glitches, or sudden surprise reveals that are obviously influenced by emerging competitive markets, the cast is nicely diverse and consistent and they don't age out of their roles because everything was obviously filmed in succession.
All Fear Street lacks is what any post-modern cinema lacks. When you re-implement something from the past, you miss out on the authenticity of the past. That includes the good and the bad, of course.
It's a trade off, though. There are some things from the past I'm not interested in representing on screen. A fictional past is often more pleasant than the real past, so I don't mind some things missing from modern storytelling. But there are quirks of the film business that lead to some seriously charming moments in cinema. The Evil Dead movies from 2013 and 2023 are excellent, but you don't get the sheer weirdness of Evil Dead 2 featuring a remake of the first Evil Dead movie compressed into its first 20 minutes.
Post-modern cinema will end up having its own charm in retrospect, of course. I think I see some of it already, like the clumsy way it drops movie-length flashbacks into the otherwise simple story it's trying to tell. Would it have just been better without the bookends, and played in reverse order? Just wait for the fan edit!
As individual movies, the Fear Street series gets pretty much everything exactly right. You like seeing some people die, and you feel deeply for others. As the story develops, it confirms some of your inevitable theories, and dashes others away. It's a fun ride, but maybe not as a trilogy, or at least not back to back. Maybe watch Part 1 and then wait a few months, and then Part 2 and wait, and then Part 3? Or just do a fan edit: Start with 1666, then 1978, and then finish it with all 1994 footage.
If you're already a horror fan, you'll likely appreciate the familiar storytelling. If you're new to horror, you'll likely appreciate the movies.
Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash