A few years ago, while discussing his opinions on the Oscar eligibility of streaming services such as Netflix, Steven Spielberg equated Netflix-produced movies with television, given that they are deigned for a platform that is watched on the small screen rather than the large. It was a minor controversy, brought up again relatively recently when he himself signed a deal with that same platform, perceived by some as either hypocritical or selling out. However there is a point to be made there, streaming services having now effectively replaced basic cable in many peoples’ homes. And it’s a format suited for long-form media more than traditional cinema because an ongoing series is more attractive to maintaining subscriptions. Mainstream movies themselves have become more like TV shows -you can simply look to franchises like the MCU and the Fast and Furious series for proof of that. And in fact it’s all being blended so much now that budgets and scopes and casts and crews are no obstacle, that both mediums are becoming interchangeable -Matt Zoller-Seitz wrote a great article about this very phenomenon a few years ago.
Fear Street I think is the proof that Spielberg was at least partially right in his original assessment. This trilogy releasing one a week until July 16th is much more like a multi-part TV special or miniseries (something like the 1990 It) than three individual movies. And I didn’t fully realize this until seeing Part Two: 1978 with its’ various hallmarks of TV serials, from a recap of the previous episode to the set-up for the next storyline. Of course in terms of critical assessment or quality, such a distinction really doesn’t matter, but I think it is fascinating and worth pointing out, especially given Fear Street works better viewed as a TV series.
Coming to that conclusion, I understand now why these movies were made at the same time. Fear Street: 1978 could not have been released even a year after the first one -it needed that close proximity. The first film being fresh in the mind of audiences is necessary for the effect of the second, it’s merely a piece of a larger puzzle and unlike the first film has no real resolution. But I genuinely wasn’t expecting to continue to be invested in this series by the end of part two. Fear Street: 1978 is not as good as its’ predecessor, and in fact it falls short in a number of the very areas where 1994 succeeded, but it nonetheless does carry your interest relatively well for a film that is largely just a pastiche of Friday the 13th.
And it is probably the biggest weakness of the film that it doesn’t offer much in the way of anything new in this specific slasher homage. In tone and pace, aesthetic and even in gore it’s just plainly derivative, lacking some of that subversion that 1994 had in its characters and structure, and demonstrating less self-awareness in its’ inherent cheesiness. As such the precise tributes in several scenes and shots, such as a pair of camp counselors being murdered after having sex or the axe murderer villain tearing into a wall in the exact composition as The Shining, don’t feel as nifty as the first film replicating visuals from Halloween. Even the witch involvement that links this movie to the first and continues that story, is buried for much of the runtime as just the unseen power controlling the killer. The campground is a far less exciting environment as well -there’s not a lot of dimension to it or visual variety. These films don’t have especially high budgets, and you can feel this one in particular struggling with that at certain junctures -the camp buildings couldn’t look more generic.
Once again, the cast is largely made up of teenagers -with the notable exception of Gillian Jacobs telling this story to the protagonists of 1994. It’s a shame Kiana Madeira’s Deena is made to sit this one out though, the story instead centring on a pair of sisters, one of them doomed to die and the other our narrator at a Shadyside/Sunnyvale summer camp in 1978. They have archetype personalities even more palpable than the cast of the first film: Ziggy (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) is the misunderstood antisocial scapegoat while Cindy (Emily Rudd) is the responsible, virginal paragon -a model “final girl” if ever there was one. But while the script isn’t terribly helpful for them and doesn’t really divert from the standard arcs for their characters, both Sink and Rudd are very good, and make for decently involving leads. Honestly the stand-out though is Ryan Simpkins as bully girl Alice, whose storyline and relationship to Cindy is the closest the film gets to the compelling dynamic of Deena and Sam from the first movie -as much as the film tries to stress Cindy and Ziggy’s relationship as that parallel. The rest of the cast make for perfectly good slasher victims, whether they’re the mean popular girls or the persecuted dorks.
Credit to director Leigh Janiak (who wrote this one with Zak Olkewicz), she maintains her envelope-pushing from the first movie and even goes a bit further. There’s more swearing and sex in this installment that’s perhaps a tad cheap in its’ usage, but the violence is upped significantly from the first movie in its’ much higher body count (it would seem a decent chunk of the campers perish) and the vividness with which its’ carried out. Not all that shocking or inventive for an average slasher movie, but for one targeting at least a somewhat younger audience its’ pretty savage. There’s also the fact it doesn’t discriminate by age and that the actors for the most part are age-appropriate themselves. Twelve year-olds attend this camp and twelve year-olds die there.
The film wants you to take stock of this and feel that grimness. At the same time it’s concerned with accentuating its’ atmosphere and sense of place -and it does this by making the mistake of so many movies set during a specific era of modern American history: filling the soundtrack with seemingly arbitrary pop hits from that period. The music for Fear Street: 1978 is obnoxious, with most of the needle-drops being extremely overused (“Slow Ride”), weirdly inappropriate (“Moonage Daydream”), reminiscent of better uses in other more famous movies (“Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show”), or a mix of all three (“Carry On Wayward Son” -which accompanies a climactic stalking scene incidentally). With that one exception, Janiak knows not to put songs in the integral moments of horror, but in compensation for this fills up the early portion of the movie with musical references to an absurd degree, the film going through roughly five needle-drops in the span of about ten minutes. It’s a distraction and one that betrays a degree of inexperience when it comes to integrating pop music with movies. Here’s hoping the next is equally as unrelenting with Baroque hits from Monteverdi or Purcell.
Yes, the final movie of this Fear Street series is going to 1666, presumably to the beginning of these towns’ existence and using Puritan-themed horror (such as The Witch) as its’ model. This movie sets it up in a bizarre twist of circumstances that fits in with the goofy reality underpinning these films and I’m curious to see how it ends. Fear Street: 1978 though, despite it’s loosely related plot making it likely the most standalone of the bunch, is also the quintessential middle film of a trilogy. It’s mostly average with a few standout components, though dependent on its’ placement within the larger series. I would guess on an individual level it’s likely to be the most forgotten of these three films, but we’ll see what 1666 has to offer. After all, series finales have a way of contextualizing all that came before.
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