Rebecca Gibson
Note: This essay contains spoilers for It: Chapter Two.
Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy (2021) is the latest in a long line of cinematic releases which capitalise on horror nostalgia, building off the platform’s reputation for scrupulous period detail in Stranger Things (2016-ongoing) but this time tackling the nineties slasher. Based on R. L. Stine’s book series of the same name, originally published in 1993, Leigh Janiak’s new adaptations unsurprisingly update the original trilogy, in which protagonist Nora’s object of forbidden love was a boy named Daniel. In fact, Stine’s entire original trilogy hinges on multiple sets of Romeo and Juliet-esque star-crossed teenage lovers, with marriage as the couples’ immediate goal and signifier of a happy ending. Janiak’s adaptation rewrites this, centring queer female couple Deena and Samantha as the trilogy’s main characters. Deena and Samantha survive death, loss, and generational trauma to be together; their happy ending reads as a pointed reimagining of more common tragic endings for queer women and women of colour in the slasher subgenre.
Originally intended to be released in cinemas one month apart by 20th Century Studios, the Fear Street trilogy fell prey to Covid-19 chaos and was sold to Netflix for distribution due to uncertainty over cinema-going numbers. Arguably, Netflix’s distribution model works better for the trilogy, as it allowed viewers to binge-watch all three films in sequence and thereby get the most out of their extensive worldbuilding. The trilogy takes place in a small American town, appropriately named Shadyside, cursed to become something of a slasher factory: residents routinely snap and embark on massacres, supposedly at the whim of local ghost Sarah Fier, who was executed for witchcraft in 1666. Part One: 1994 sets up the trilogy’s slasher premise while Part Two: 1978 takes place at a local summer camp – more slashing – and Part Three: 1666 yanks the viewer back to the town’s original settlement, Union, to explore how it became cursed in the first place. Hefty doses of psychological time travel and classic Gothic frame narratives combine to make this a fairly madcap venture, but as noted by The Guardian reviewer Benjamin Lee, this matches the tone of the R. L. Stine book series: “it’s like we’re curled up reading it on the school bus, treated like the Stine fans of the past not the eye-rolling cool kids of the future.” Lee also compares the trilogy to Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), noting that Janiak demonstrates a similar respect for her characters “and the gravity of their emotional dynamics, as rooted in slasher horror as it was in teen drama.”
Updating the trilogy so that it revolves around a queer female couple adds a welcome dose of modernity to this nostalgia trip. The slasher subgenre has a penchant for Final Girls, but horror has a bad reputation when it comes to the survival of queer characters and characters of colour – especially women. Netflix’s supernatural drama The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) came under fire last year thanks to the death of a lesbian character in its final episode; a death which left her lover clinging to her memory for decades, forming Bly Manor’s frame narrative. “With its tragic romantic ending, ‘Bly Manor’ trades in the same tired and harmful ‘kill your gays’ trope that has plagued Hollywood for years,” argued Jude Dry for IndieWire. When engaging with such criticisms, it’s important to remember that horror is a genre in which anyone making it out alive can often be considered a bonus. However, “Bury Your Gays” has its own TV Tropes page for a reason; there are enough examples of queer characters who are “nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts”’ to demonstrate a pattern, one which can often be frustrating to witness – especially for queer viewers (TVTropes.org). Indeed, the phenomenon was originally known as “Dead Lesbian Syndrome,” indicating how the trope disproportionately affects lesbian characters (TvTropes.org).
Deena and Samantha from the Fear Street trilogy subvert this trope. Carol J. Clover’s foundational Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) is the text which originated the term “Final Girl,” exploring for the first time how slasher, occult, and rape-revenge horror films tended to align the viewer with the tormented female protagonist rather than with the (usually male) attacker. Clover’s new preface in the 2015 edition of Men, Women, and Chain Saws noted that the Final Girl has by now “eclipsed other figures and issues in the book …Detached from her low-budget origins and messier meanings, she now circulates in these mostly cleaner and more upscale venues as a ‘female avenger,’ ‘triumphant feminist hero’ and the like” (x). Fear Street is undoubtedly a cleaner enterprise than the films Clover discusses in her book – slick and flashy with plenty of neon accents, a cornucopia of tongue-in-cheek needle drops, and a socially progressive central message – but central heroine Deena (and her girlfriend Samantha) still fit Clover’s definition of “tortured survivor” rather than “feminist hero” (x).
They may come out on top, but Deena and Samantha are by no means safe in the world of Fear Street. In Part One: 1994, Samantha becomes a target for the legion of Shadyside serial killers after accidentally spilling blood on the site of Sarah Fier’s buried remains in the woods between Shadyside and Sunnyvale, the cursed town’s opposite number (subtlety, thy name is Fear Street). Throughout the course of the film, Samantha dies and is resuscitated in an attempt to stymie the killers’ fixation on her, only to become possessed at the very end of the film. Part Two: 1978 largely focuses on the story of a young camp counsellor and her sister in Camp Nightwing as they are pursued by – you guessed it! – a Shadyside slasher; the relation of these events by sole survivor Ziggy leads Deena to the discovery of Fier’s remains. In Part Three: 1666, Deena is psychologically transported back to the past through her connection with Fier’s remains and lives through her final days, culminating in Fier’s execution as a witch. The climax of the film reveals that Shadyside has been trapped in this cursed cycle by none other than the ancestors of the sheriff himself – the Goode family made their deal with the devil long ago, reaping extensive financial and social benefits at the expense of Shadyside citizens; in 1994, Nick Goode is Sunnyvale’s sheriff while his brother Will is the mayor.
In the final film, the actors playing Deena and Samantha are recast as Sarah Fier and her would-be lover Hannah Miller, a clever move which deepens the viewer’s connection to the characters and provides the opportunity to bring back those who died too soon. It also elevates the trilogy into a story about cyclical trauma and abuse of authority; the repeat casting is not meant to be taken literally to imply reincarnation but to demonstrate that the characters are trapped in a cycle of atrocities which is doomed to repeat unless they can find a way out. The curse was inflicted upon Shadyside by a straight white man (Solomon Goode, Nick’s ancestor) at the expense of a queer woman (Sarah Fier) whose first kiss with another girl is presented to the townspeople by Goode as an act of perversion and witchcraft, an explanation which leads to her execution. Part Three: 1666 is at pains to emphasise just how thoroughly history has preserved the false version of Fier’s story: it takes Deena being thrown back in time and into Fier’s own body for the truth to be revealed.
Nick Goode’s position in Part One: 1994 as the world-weary sheriff looks a little different with the benefit of such hindsight. In Part Two: 1978, he plays a role that amounts to the romantic lead, only for the last film to reveal his role in the massacre of Shadysiders at Camp Nightwing. Nick might save his love interest Ziggy in Part Two: 1978, but the revelation of his later culpability demonstrates that Nick is willing to sacrifice an entire summer camp of children in order to maintain his family’s wealth and political supremacy. Throughout this film, Nick is shown to be reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps and become sheriff only to eventually acquiesce to his fate, unable to refuse the allure of institutional power. Nick’s role as the sheriff and his brother’s position as mayor emphasises that his ancestor Solomon’s sacrifice of Sarah Fier – who had previously been Solomon’s friend – is preserved in the current timeline. In this slasher, the central antagonist is not a being of pure inexplicable evil like Michael Myers or a monster who walks in dreams like Freddy Krueger – both of which are overtly referenced in the film’s cast of Shadyside killers – but a character who explicitly works to uphold structural inequalities which privilege whiteness at the expense of minorities. He just does it via Satanic ritual rather than gerrymandering.
Even before this revelation, the signs of Shadyside’s curse are clear and prevalent beyond just the town’s propensity for producing slashers. As noted by Lee, “the lightly etched throughline of lower-class status being a curse is well-highlighted;” the original town Union was neatly sliced in half after Goode’s bargain and Shadyside became the poor cousin to Sunnyvale, providing a bountiful supply of sacrifices to fuel the success of the neighbouring town. The class inequality between Shadyside and Sunnyvale provides the base layer of the romantic conflict between Deena and Samantha. Broken up at the beginning of the trilogy, the emotional arc of Part One: 1994 requires Deena and Samantha to work out their issues, namely that Deena feels Samantha is ashamed of their relationship and left her in order to pursue a more conventionally acceptable lifestyle in Sunnyvale, with all the associated social benefits of dating a male football player rather than a moody Black lesbian in nineties small town America. Sam naturally refutes this reading of the situation, and the relationship drama progresses from there – part of the fun of Fear Street is that Janiak never forgets this is primarily a story about and for teenagers – but underneath that melodrama is an undercurrent of real tension. Deena spends most of the trilogy convinced that she and her friends will never see a better life than the one Shadyside can offer them; she’s firmly mired in doom-and-gloom cynicism, confident of her own disposability and shackled to her paranoid self-preservation instincts. It’s hard not to read her as a comment on the horror genre’s propensity towards killing off its minority characters; Deena doesn’t need any convincing that monsters are out to get her. The real surprise is that Sam turns out to be the target instead.
In 2019, It: Chapter Two – another text depicting the horrors of small town America, albeit with a very different source than Fear Street – was heavily criticised for its opening scene, in which a young gay man falls victim to a homophobic hate crime. This scene is taken from Stephen King’s original novel and is itself a thinly veiled recreation of the real-life murder of Charlie Howard, a 23-year-old from King’s hometown of Bangor, Maine. One could argue that the film’s iteration of this murder was a justifiable depiction of homophobic violence, given that King originally wrote it himself. However, while King appears to have been deeply affected by Howard’s murder and uses this instance of homophobic violence in the novel to signal the powerful and disturbing hatred which is putrefying the town of Derry from the inside out, responses to the version of the scene in the 2019 film were notably more conflicted. The Advocate published the headline: “IT‘s Gay Bashing Scene Serves No Purpose Except as Porn for Homophobes” while Slate ran with: “It: Chapter Two’s Gay-Bashing Scene Exploits a Real-Life Killing for a Cheap Shock.” Not all reviews were negative, but most struggled to balance this violent scene with the film’s later revelation that main character Richie Tozier is gay and in love with his childhood friend Eddie Kaspbrak. This update to King’s original novel is shakily deployed, leaning hard on subtext rather than stating anything outright, and ultimately only leads to more tragedy when Eddie dies in the film’s final fight. In Slate, Jeffrey Bloomer argues that director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman’s reasoning for including the opening murder scene – “it’s something that we’re still suffering. Hate crimes are still happening” – “suggest[s] a half-baked understanding of what calls for different kinds of violence on screen.” While King situated his novel in 1986 – just two years after Charlie Howard’s death – It: Chapter Two takes place in 2016, replicating the scene’s original violence and clumsily marrying it with a badly executed queer makeover for one of the main characters, conveying the impression that queer storylines in horror are somehow still trapped in the eighties.
In comparison, Janiak’s adaptation of Fear Street is a more successful update of a late twentieth century horror text not only because it more effectively incorporates a queer storyline, but also because it reflects back on the trials and tribulations of Final Girls past – as well as the girls who didn’t make it. Deena and Samantha are not just themselves but also many other potential versions; Deena is transported back into Sarah Fier’s body and sees not only how Fier died but in her death, an echo of how Deena or Samantha’s life could have ended, too. Such liminality makes them memorable, their relationship bending time and space in an incredibly teenage vision of true love, one which nonetheless comes with a sting as they are overlaid with death. Victims of sacrifice and resurrection, the deaths of Samantha and Sarah Fier and Deena-as-Sarah call back to the deaths of many other queer girls in horror films past before snapping back to a bright neon nineties present for a surprisingly heart-warming ending. The shift back to 1994 at the two-thirds mark of Part Three: 1666 signals not only survival for Deena and Samantha but a chance at the kind of genuine happiness that would not have been possible in the earlier timeline. Fear Street acknowledges the tragedy of that historic impossibility without allowing it to warp the present. By situating Deena and Samantha’s principal narrative thread in 1994 rather than the present day, Fear Street not only surrounds itself with the accoutrements of nineties slasher horror but also attempts to rewrite them, including queer characters who die but also come back, allowing Deena and Samantha not only to survive but, ultimately, to thrive.
Works Cited
Bloomer, Jeffrey. “It: Chapter Two’s Gay-Bashing Scene Exploits a Real-Life Killing for a Cheap Shock.” Slate, 5 September 2019, https://slate.com/culture/2019/09/it-chapter-two-homophobic-killing-charlie-howard-opening-scene.html.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Dry, Jude. “Bly Manor’s Lesbian Love Story Is No Cause to Celebrate.” IndieWire, 28 October 2020, https://www.indiewire.com/2020/10/haunting-of-bly-manor-lesbian-love-story-netflix-horror-lgbtq-1234595503/.
Lee, Benjamin. “Fear Street Part 1: 1994 Review – NETFLIX Trilogy Kicks off with Gory Gusto.” The Guardian, 30 June 2021, www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jun/30/fear-street-part-1-1994-review-netflix-trilogy.
Lee, Jonathan and Taylor Drake. “IT‘s Gay Bashing Scene Serves No Purpose Except as Porn for Homophobes.” The Advocate, 12 September 2019, https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2019/9/12/its-gay-bashing-scene-serves-no-purpose-except-porn-homophobes.
“Bury Your Gays.” TVTropes.org, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays.
