A Xennial’s Review of Netflix’s “Fear Street Part One: 1994”

Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s was terrifying.

It was only natural that we gravitated to the fictional spooky when our young lives were filled with real-life Big Bads like creeps in white vans and teenagers who tried to force us to smoke crack in the park (or so the ABC Afterschool Specials foretold).

The problem was that we were a bit too young for the really scary stuff — Stephen King and Wes Craven and Clive Barker — not that we didn’t try, of course. Personally, I have very vivid memories of reading the first half of Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror before hiding the book away on my parents’ bookshelf — backward — so that I wouldn’t have to look at the cover.

Enter Point Horror.

In the late ‘80s, Scholastic Inc. threw a bunch of like-minded YA authors in a blender with some teenage angst and a bunch of standard horror tropes and called it Point Horror. They were perfect books for budding horror aficionados; scary but not overly gory, teeming with horny teenage undertones, and plot twists juuuuust a bit off the rails enough to be shocking. They churned these books out like sausage on a pig farm, and we couldn’t get enough.

R.L. Stine was arguably the Poet Laureate of Point Horror. Stine, a former Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum joke writer (It’s true! Look it up!), created the Fear Street books; novellas that had zero connection to each other than the fact that the characters in them lived on the fictional Fear Street — which was haunted or cursed or something.

I honestly don’t remember.

When Netflix — bless their nostalgic hearts — announced that they were releasing a Fear Street movie trilogy, my 10-year-old inner child practically hyperventilated with anticipation. These books have been screaming to be made into full-length movies for ages, and it’s insane that no one had ever tried until now.

The first of the series — Fear Street Part One: 1994 — dropped on Friday, July 2nd, but because my 10-year-old inner child is trapped in the body of a 42-year-old woman with a job and a kid, I didn’t get a chance to watch it until today.

You guys. WTF did I just watch?!

The story starts like all good horror movies do: at the mall. It’s closing time, and a singular B. Dalton Booksellers customer angrily throws a copy of R.L. Stine’s Wrong Number onto the counter in front of Robin from Stranger Things — er, sorry, a clerk named Heather (Maya Hawke).

See, I got confused because Netflix very clearly made the Fear Street production team borrow the Starcourt Mall set from the Stranger Things production team instead of springing for a new one.

Seriously. Tell me I’m wrong:

Anyway, Robin — er , sorry— Heather closes up the store, flirts with a Spencer’s Gifts employee named Chad or Chuck or something (David W. Thompson), and then gets horribly stabbed to death by a dude in a skeleton mask. In her parting shot (that isn’t quite a shot-for-shot rip-off of Drew Barrymore’s death in Scream but isn’t NOT that, either), Heather reaches up and pulls off her killer’s mask, revealing…(dun dun DUN) Chad-or-Chuck-or-something! The very dude she was just flirting with!

Why, Chad-or-Chuck-or-something? WHY?

Then a cop shoots Chad-or-Chuck-or-something through the forehead.

After an agonizingly long opening credit sequence in which we learn through quick smash cuts of newspaper clippings that lots of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things that happened in Shadyside (the town where the original Fear Street books took place), we are introduced to Deena (Kiana Madeira)and her brother Josh (Benjamin Flores, Jr). Deena is an angsty teen in the midst of an angsty breakup with someone named Sam, and she’s angstily writing an I Hate You Sam note in her bedroom while every single angsty grunge song from the early ‘90s plays in the background.

Side note: according to whatever team of fresh-faced Gen Z Creative Writing majors Netflix hired to craft this movie, the only ‘90s artists that existed were Garbage and Radiohead.

Meanwhile, brother Josh is deep into an AIM conversation with someone with the moniker QueenofAiranDarkness (Oof, she’s gonna regret that one in 20 years, amirite? I mean, my first AIM screen name was JessaBelle12, and I’m just now coming to terms with it…).

The chatter on the World Wide Web — that’s actually what we called it back in the day — is that the town of Shadyside is cursed by an evil witch named Sarah Fear, who occasionally possesses unsuspecting teens once every few decades and drives them to commit mass murder. Josh is convinced that Chad-or- Chuck-or-something is Sarah’s latest victim.

Then the teens go to school, and we’re introduced to popular cheerleader bitch Kate (Julia Rehwald) and tweaky-stoner Simon (Fred Hechinger), and then we follow the gang to their rival high school, where we finally meet Sam (Olivia Welch). Sam is…gasp!…a girl!

Fights and dangerous pranks ensue. There’s a car accident, and somehow Sam inadvertently touches the bones of Sarah Fear, bringing to life all of the Shadyside mass murders throughout the years and a whole bunch of new questions that (spoiler alert) won’t be answered in the remaining hour of the movie. Our mighty heroes have to figure out how to stop Sarah Fear’s evil band of possessed zombie ghost killers.

First, they try to explode them, but those pesky zombie ghost killers just regenerate from the gelatinous ooze they left behind. Here’s a screenshot gif:

Oops. Sorry. That’s Season 3 Episode 5 of Stranger Things. I mean, it’s essentially the same footage, though, so I’ll just leave it there.

In one and a half hours, our heroes:

• Figure out the entire lore of Sarah Fear from two Web searches and some newspaper clippings
• DO NOT REFERENCE LIVING ON FEAR STREET AT ALL

• Amass a ridiculous amount of explosives and corrosive chemicals from an unknown source
• Steal an ambulance and a cop’s service revolver without arousing suspicion
• DO NOT call law enforcement, even though the Mysterious Cop With a Past (Ashley Zuckerman) totally believed them earlier and actually encouraged them to call him if they needed help
• Go to the grocery store set from Stranger Things, raid the unlocked pharmacy, and steal a ridiculous amount of narcotics

(Again…am I wrong?!)

Here’s the thing.

Fear Street Part One: 1994 is not a bad horror movie on its own. The characters are a little derivative and the plot is predictable, but the actors are fantastic and the effects are convincing. In fact, a lot of the kills in this movie are reminiscent of the good ole’ Tom Savini practical effects of yore. The problem is that Fear Street is not what we Gen-X/Xennials expected — or wanted, really — and that is a huge let-down.

There were so many great stand-alone stories in the Fear Street series — and honestly, in all the Point Horror cannon — and we were thisclose to being able to relive our tween years through cinema AND introduce a whole new generation to the genre we loved so dearly.

And Netflix missed the mark.

Fear Street Part One: 1994 is definitely worth a watch. If you grew up reading these spooky, wonderful books, though…don’t expect too much.

This story originally appeared at: https://jalconaway.medium.com/