REVIEW: Fear Street Reveals the Poverty of Pastiche
Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street sets out to revive the teen slasher, but seems content to play around with its corpse
by Kurt Schiller
Fear Street—the new three-part horror series from Netflix and director Leigh Janiak—begins with a promising burst of neon, blood, and period-appropriate music.
In the first few minutes of its first installment—set in 1994 in the murder-stricken suburban town of Shadyside—we watch as a skull-faced killer pursues his teenage victim through a late-night mall, Nine Inch Nails pounding over the P.A. and Nineties signifiers flitting through the frame—Software Etc, Hot Topic (still more mall-goth than anime-fan), and a litany of other long-diminished brands. In short order, traps are laid and sprung, knives are thrust into teenage flesh, and the first victim lies dead and gutted, ready for the opening credits to begin—although not before a bit of knowing meta-commentary is dispensed. (In this case, a snobby customer who purchases and then mocks the same R.L. Stine book series on which the film is based).
It’s a capable, skillfully executed introduction to a film that follows gleefully in the increasingly distant footsteps of the mid-90s teen slasher boom. This is a movie that wears its influences not just on its sleeve, but square in the center of its chest: self-aware neo-slashers like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, sexually charged high-school horror flicks like Disturbing Behavior and The Faculty, and a healthy dash of the neon-and-teased-hair grand guignol of the mid-Eighties slasher golden age. (Like many recent pieces of throwback media, Fear Street Part 1: 1994 blurs the Eighties and Nineties into a commingled mess of neon and grunge that suggests Twisted Sister and Pretty Poison might have toured with Nirvana and House of Pain. We should have been so lucky.)
If Fear Street isn’t really the pitch-perfect Nineties horror facsimile that some reviews have made it out to be, it at least passes the smell test in a way that Marvel and DC’s throwback films (Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel) cannot. The late Eighties/early Nineties soundtrack is a bit too on-the-nose, yes, but it at least deploys slightly deeper cuts than Captain Marvel‘s “Just A Girl”-set fight scenes, and Janiak clearly has an above-average interest in verisimilitude.
There’s something strangely lifeless about the events and imagery of Fear Street.
Likewise, the literal and metaphorical guts of Fear Street Part 1:1994 feel at least superficially like a throwback to another time, when violence and especially sex weren’t quite so uncommon in mainstream film releases. During the film’s 106-minute run time, we see fresh-faced teens take axes to the face, knives to the gut, and—in one memorable sequence—a bread slicer to the skull. Meanwhile, the teens themselves sell drugs, wreak havoc on students from a rival school, and seek to get laid, following in the time-honored traditions of teenagers throughout history.
And yet… there’s something strangely lifeless about the events and imagery of Fear Street. As we watch our heroes grapple with the murderous fallout of a post-football game prank that awakens an ancient (or at least pre-industrial) evil, one can’t help but notice that these ostensibly sex-and-drug-crazed adolescents are somehow rather clean-cut. Oh, sure, they raise hell and chase tail, but not in a way that anyone is really the worse for wear. The glimpses we get of their private lives are about as interesting as an after-school special. And when a plot conundrum requires that one character ingest a cocktail of illegal pharmaceuticals readily provided by another (she’s only dealing to pay for college, of course), they go about dosing her with all the caution and professionalism of credentialed pharmacists. It all sounds shocking written out, but feels oddly antiseptic on-screen.
The same can be said of the superficially grisly on-screen gore. Watching the cast get picked off one by one with imaginative kills, you begin to notice that it never really disturbs the plot, never really traumatizes the characters—or the audience, for that matter. It’s a far cry from the anything-goes, knife-to-the-heart horror romps of an earlier age, when blood and guts and bone made frequent and controversial appearances designed to leave you reeling with pulse-pounding efficiency.
And there’s something else missing from Fear Street, something more troubling than just the aesthetics of authenticity: meaning.
Long seen as a disreputable dumping ground of gore and unease, horror films have always been an outlet for deeper artistic and thematic urges. In years past, it was slashers and grindhouse films that found ways to comment on the post-war malaise of the Seventies, the capitalist bacchanalia of the Eighties, and the end-of-history paralysis of the Nineties in ways both subversive and inventive, cloaking potent social commentary in a patina of gore and viscera. Even Fear Street’s less pedigreed antecedents—the numerous and quickly forgotten slew of Scream imitators—typically managed to cram an encyclopedia’s worth of subtext into their brisk running times, serving as bloody explorations of the expectations that parents place on their children and of the disorienting parallel lives and hypocrisy of scholastic authority figures.
But although Fear Street is populated with subtextually-potent figures—hulking axe murderers, secretive cops, rich preppies out for blood from the next town over—it struggles to do anything with them. Our heroes clash with the rich kids, sure, but then the plot moves on and never returns. The axe murderer is, well, just an axe murderer. Even that curiously clued-in cop does nothing of note (although one suspects this may be grist for one of the subsequent installments). The audience is left with the impression that something has been said, but you’d be hard-pressed to say precisely what it might be. It’s as if the filmmakers knew the words and phrases of the language of horror, but not how to put them into a coherent sentence.
The film makes a token effort to update the Nineties gestalt that inspired it, with a more diverse cast and more overt queer romance than one might expect from a teen horror film of the era it seeks to emulate, but in doing so these superficially revisionist elements are, ironically, robbed of any heft they might once have had.
Although Fear Street 1994 is populated with subtextually-potent figures—hulking axe murderers and rich preppies out for blood—it struggles to do anything with them.
Would the positive, loving lesbian relationship at the heart of the film have been noteworthy in a mass market commercial teen horror film from the mid-90s? Undoubtedly—and its very presence would have cast a long shadow across the rest of the text, lending it a subversive or reactionary quality depending upon the film. In 2021, however, it’s barely worth mentioning and makes little difference to the themes of the film or to the characters on-screen—even the most uptight of whom display almost none of the bigotry or hostility that might have been heaped on a queer couple in that decade. Reduced to mere window dressing, these elements function only as a bullet-point for bloggers searching for a thematic jumping off point.
(All this to say nothing of the fact that horror has made significant use of queer text and subtext for decades, often far before more mainstream cinema.)
This same absence of meaning is tangible in the film’s depiction of poverty, class, wealth, race, trauma, and history, as well as a litany of other themes and subtexts found in abundance in other horror media, now and in the mid-Nineties. Assembled piecemeal from the corpses of other franchises, Fear Street echoes with symbols and sigils of potential meaning, but they have no purchase on our world—silent ghosts passing us by, with nothing to say and no clear purpose.
Is it possible that all this is a symptom of the film’s 3-part structure? Perhaps. It’s entirely possible that subsequent installments will unearth themes and meaning as the series continues its journey through the horror sub-genres of yesteryear. But horror has never required a full series to make its themes known, and taken as a distinct object, this first installment of Fear Street feels rather empty inside.
It’s no coincidence that many of these same criticisms might be leveled at Netflix’s last prominent work of pastiche, the Spielbergian sci-fi-horror series Stranger Things. As pieces of art that define themselves largely by their connections to the cinema of yesterday, both properties are sandwiched uncomfortably between the past and the present, neither one thing nor the other. Made in the modern day for a modern audience, they have no particular interest in commenting on the eras from which they draw; and as faux artifacts, they largely avoid addressing the present at all, content in duplicating the superficial aesthetics of the past.
It’s easy to imagine a smarter, more thematically resonant version of Fear Street that uses the tools of horror to comment on the onrushing weight of history that was even then preparing to collide headlong with the film’s teenage protagonists, or to draw parallels between the uncertainty of today’s youth and an earlier generation. Instead, we’re left with a rough simulacra dressed in the ill-fitting clothes of better, more resonant films.
None of which is to say that the film is unenjoyable, or even bad—far from it. Janiak’s direction is capable and exciting, and suggests the potential for a long and interesting career in the genre (her 2014 debut, Honeymoon, certainly looks worth a watch). The visuals, both the kills and more quotidian shots, are interesting and well executed. The pastiche is largely on point, and the film as a whole succeeds in hauling a largely dead horror sub-genre more or less back out of the grave.
But watching the credits roll and the teaser for the subsequent installment—Fear Street Part 2: 1978, a Friday the Thirteenth homage at a Carter-era summer camp—it’s hard to get over the sense that this was a film that took a skilled director, sizable budget, capable cast, and all the buzzing tools and grinding cinematic machinery of multiple decades of horror cinema, and rather than go somewhere interesting was content to just rev the engine in the driveway.
Kurt Schiller is the editor of Blood Knife and co-host of the podcast Parents Just Don't Understand. You can find him on Twitter at @mechanicalkurt.
