Loosely based on the young adult horror books written by R. L. Stine during the 1990s, the first installment of the Fear Street adaptation achieves a good deal of success in capturing elements of Stine’s writing while gearing the production for an audience now well into adulthood. Though likely to draw a new audience unfamiliar with the source material, this movie was produced to appeal to those who might have grown up reading Stine’s books for younger readers and young adults. While the Fear Street books were more violent and gory than a lot of Stine’s writing geared toward a younger audience, this movie amplifies that element quite nicely.
A killer is on the loose in Shadyside, but this isn’t the first time. In a town with a history of mysterious plagues of madness and murder, can Deena and her brother Josh hope to discover the secret behind these horrors before they–and all of their friends–are slain?
On the surface, it’s a color-by-number slasher flick complete with Shadyside High School students as fodder, but more backstory and mythology is forming the substrate than is typical in slasher fare. With an obvious fondness for the slasher flicks of the 1990s, one can’t help but see ample homage to such borderline classics as Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend. Fear Street: 1994 goes beyond the superficial slasher characteristics, however, and incorporates a tale of witchcraft, and a town cursed for centuries into the narrative, setting the stage for the subsequent two volumes of the series.
The deaths are often fantastic, brutal, and gory–I doubt anyone will look at an industrial bread-slicer the same way again–and the story flows nicely at a fast pace, balancing suspense and jump scares as well as one could hope for.
The characters don’t consist solely of two-dimensional ciphers, as has become the meme for these types of movies, but they almost couldn’t be if the series is expected to span three movies. I found them largely likable and sympathetic.