#Fear street bread slicer series

The film also has an element of Stephen King in how it invests in its characters, building up their motivations and spending time on their relationships, especially the romance between Deena, who is out, and Samantha, who hides their relationship from her mom. So there is a cool score and trendy needle drops and references to 1990s slasher films, but there is also the logic of a horror novel for teens, with discoveries of hidden documents and ancient curses, and a quest-style structure as the characters piece together the mystery. Instead, like Stranger Things or CW’s Riverdale, it uses its knowing approach to stay on the same wavelength as its ideal viewer, revelling in its homages, such as the opening sequence, needle drops of favourite songs from the period, like Radiohead’s “Creep,” or stylistic expectations of contemporary horror cinema, such as its neon-lit, widescreen cinematography and synth-heavy score.īut where Stranger Things takes its storytelling cue from Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter films, Fear Street uses the paperback novel logic of R. It’s a knowing film, but it’s not snarky and doesn’t use the knowingness to poke fun at the genre or excuse itself from delivering the necessary thrills. This opening is instructive because the rest of the film that follows is constantly gesturing at its influences, source material, or generic expectations. Hawke, who is a Stranger Things alum, is the biggest name of the young stars here and follows in Barrymore’s footsteps by being memorably dispatched within the opening moments. Janiak knows she’s copying the famous opening of Scream, where Drew Barrymore, the biggest star in the film, is dispatched within 10 minutes.

There’s no one on the other end and eventually, someone in a creepy skull mask shows up and chases her throughout the mall and murders her with a butcher knife. It starts with a homage to Wes Craven’s Scream, with a girl, played by Maya Hawke, getting a mysterious call as she closes down the bookstore at the mall.

The plot revolves around several teenagers-pragmatic Deena (Kiana Madeira), her closeted girlfriend, Samantha (Olivia Scott Welch), nerdy little brother, Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.), and party animal friends Kate (Julia Rehwald) and Simon (Fred Hechinger)-living in Shadyside, “the murder capital of the United States,” who have to deal with a masked killer brutally slaying kids around town and undo the curse of a 17th-century witch, Sarah Fier (pronounced like “fear”), which drives the town’s inhabitants insane.

#Fear street bread slicer series

It’s an effective slasher film, but without any definitively original element in its filmmaking.Īs the name suggests, Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street Part One: 1994 is the first part of a horror trilogy (all directed by Janiak) based on a series of teen horror novels by Goosebumps author, R. In short, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a successor to Stranger Things and other popular geek properties that mine references to past pop-culture artifacts to fuel nostalgia. It’s progressive in its characterizations and storytelling, but downright grisly in its violence. It’s aimed at teenage viewers, but draws all its reference points from films that were made before its target viewers were born.

It’s stylized, self-aware, has a dense storyworld mythology, and is endlessly nostalgic in its approach to genre and storytelling. Fear Street Part One: 1994 embodies many of the core interests of contemporary streaming entertainment.