 In 2014 I started working on a horror screenplay called Daylight. I've been tweaking it on and off for the past seven years and in 2021 I think it's finally in a place where it's pretty good. It's one of them cabin in the woods type movies, but not like cabin in the woods. Look, I'm not here to pit you on it. The reason I bring it up is because the idea for Daylight struck me moments after the credits rolled on the best film I saw at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, a spooky little debut from one lead Janiac called Honeymoon. I think I have mentioned Honeymoon a few times before on this channel as a film that I wish I had reviewed back in the day because even more than usual I think your reaction to it says much more about you than it does the film and specifically it says a lot about what you're afraid of, which is fascinating. You see I found the first half of the movie scary as hell and the second half not so much but a colleague I talked with afterwards felt the exact opposite way and that's because at the halfway point the film basically changes genre recontextualizing what we've seen in a way that will terrify some and nullify others. But no matter your fears Honeymoon promised an exciting new voice in the space whose follow-up I have been waiting for ever since. You know, although Janiac had a hand in directing a couple of TV episodes over the past few years she has not put out another feature until now. Though I guess as consolation she got three. A trilogy of films released on Netflix over the course of three weeks. And while I decided that I wanted to talk about them on this channel halfway through part one the whole experiment of it got me thinking. And so rather than doing a miniseries like I had with small acts I wanted to wait and see how it worked as a whole. I'm glad I did. Hello by the way and welcome to the week air of view you can call me a sellout. And today I am talking about Fear Street parts one through three. The films are based on the wildly successful book series by R.L. Stein, though the stories contained within its parts set in 1994, 1978 and 1666 respectively are original, which basically means it's named for the wildly popular book series by R.L. Stein. But fair enough if you are taking a chance on something as big as an entire trilogy filmed at once and potentially released that way to I can see why the powers that be would want some name recognition to increase the chance that all of the money they spent licensing the damn needle drops would do whatever it is that Netflix movies need to do to justify their existence. Now, R.L. Stein was apparently my favorite author when I was in third grade, according to a spiral bound yearbook that I found not too long ago in a box at my childhood home. But I never read Fear Street. I never even heard of Fear Street. It was meant for older kids, I guess. And by the time that I was one of those, I had jumped straight to Stephen King. But I do know now that the myriad Fear Street books are set in the same fictional town of Shadyside, within which there is a fear street named for one of its founding families or something. Point is the place is helicurse. And cursed towns sure do offer a lot of opportunities for storytellers to kind of run wild, which is why each book follows different characters. Although some folks show up here and there and elsewhere. By and large, the books are standalone, which makes the choice of an interconnected trilogy kind of unexpected. And it wasn't always the plan. Like the rights to a film adaptation were initially acquired all the way back in 1997, but the project went dark, perhaps because Stein stopped writing the series two years later. But he has returned to it a few times since and at some point folks got interested again. What we eventually got, three films overseen by Janiak, was announced in 2017, but her role kept expanding until she was directing and co-writing all three. Filming wrapped back in 2019, but without a clear distribution plan until Netflix grabbed it about a year ago with the intent to release one a month over three months. That was ultimately shortened to the weekly drops that we saw. I watched the films on release as opposed to waiting for a binge. And if you follow me on TikTok and saw my 30 second hot takes, you'll know that I wasn't a huge fan of this schedule in week two, but found it pretty critical in week three. And that has to do with the way that each film relates to each other. The present day story takes place in 1994, the shady side which Sarah Fear has struck again. We get one of those classic slasher openings where a well known actress shows up to be brutally murdered by a masked killer setting off a chain of events that will change the course of this sleepy little town forever. Except not really. It's not changing anything. This happens every 20 years or so. Some random person in town loses their mind and murders a bunch of people with some slashery implement that reflects the period. In 1994, it's a skull face rocking a knife. In 1978, a man with a bag over his head wields an axe. And though they don't get to be the focus of their own films, we do get little cameos from a few more, my favorite of which is definitely the baby with the baseball bat. I would bet at least $3 that Netflix already has a distribution partner for Halloween costumes based on every dang one of them. Dina, our protagonist and a classic non-believer, finds herself entangled in the witchery when her ex is cursed after accidentally finding and bleeding on Seraphir's body, which brings a budget-friendly handful of these slasher's back from the dead to go and take her out. Ostensibly, this series is about figuring out the whole curse thing, but it's really about Dina's relationship with this ex, Sam. And Sam, critically, is a lady, which is presented to us in a cute reversal where we see a shot that we know is Dina unhappily looking at Sam and some flusie, but because of narrative conditioning, we think that Sam is the man when in fact that man is the flusie. Now, despite how TikTok seems to have categorized me, I am not the right person to talk about the significance of this moment in the broader canon, but I look forward to the day when we see a girl in a movie looking at a couple and don't instantly assume that she's pining for a man meet McGillicuddy or whatever. And this romance is the reason that 1994 is different from 1978, from 1950, whatever, et cetera. Because Dina only cares about the whole Seraphir thing, only ends up believing it at all because Sam is cursed and eventually the evidence is pretty overwhelming. And while the rules are not super consistent, we are supposed to believe that only the subject of the curse is really being targeted, meaning Dina isn't really in danger unless she actively interferes with these sort of zombies' work and makes it feel like more of an exorcism story with a slasher veneer and that has a very different vibe. In slasher's relationships often exist mostly to torture the protagonist as she watches everyone she loves get picked off. In exorcism movies, they're much more genuine and indeed, Fear Street is about a genuine if still-teenaged romance. And that makes it stand out nearly as much as the fact that this romance is both multiracial and queer. But the trilogy gets a little too caught up in its lore at the expense of the emotional core. Both parts one and two have pretty severe pacing issues because characters spend so much time trying to figure out the horror of the town's history that we just get a series of info dumps that might be relevant, but are rarely important. And what makes matters worse is that after spending all of the time setting up a bunch of dumb shit and harping on it so that we, the audience, don't forget, they still didn't trust us to make the connections ourselves when part three starts calling back to earlier sequences that we still remember the creative team decided to put in footage from those sequences depriving us of the satisfaction of actually figuring out anything ourselves. I wish that there was an alternate version of the third movie in particular that just let the audience do the work. Like if these had come out once a year or maybe even once a month, I would get it. But when they're coming out week after week and even more so now that people are just gonna straight up binge them, there's not the time to forget. So just let us remember, huh Netflix? What's sort of weird about this is how disconnected parts one and two are from each other and how that makes them feel before you get to part three. When I was watching part two, I had kind of the same reaction I did to Black Widow which I had seen the night before. Does this even matter? Fear Street 1994 is all about a group of teenagers whose fates we don't know coming to realize that the town is legitimately cursed and then trying to figure out how to break that curse. This leads them to a character who survived the 1978 massacre and the second film is effectively her telling that story which is about a group of teenagers whose fates we do know coming to realize that the town is legitimately cursed and then trying to figure out how to break that curse. And with a shift in location means it doesn't quite feel like exactly the same movie again. Fundamentally is the same movie again. And just as we know that the already dead Natasha Romanov isn't going to do anything that meaningfully affects the MCU in her solo movie, we know that the kids in 1978 aren't gonna figure out how to stop the witch because we're in 1994 and we know that they didn't stop the damn witch. So what are we even doing here? When it's being a horror movie though I think that part two is the best of the series. Dina and Sam's relationship is completely removed from the equation bringing us back to the typical slasher vibe. Girls complaining about boys and lots of killing. The more confined location of its campground versus part one's entire town ratchets the tension way the hell up. And also it's pretty rare to see an American movie that's willing to kill actual children. Note that teenagers are in fact actual children but they are differently actual children from like 10 year olds and also they're rarely portrayed by actual children. And while those kills happen off screen it's only just. Part three's got some of that too and it gives the latter entries a much more dangerous vibe than part one which is gory but relatively tame. At least until the final set piece when we get the most shocking death in the entire series out of fucking nowhere. And I'm a big boy who can deal but I was honestly a little confused about why. Like what did that character do to deserve that? I don't know without Dean and Sam's relationship part two feels like it's just spinning the wheels a bit. Part three set 300 years before has some of that but because it is not a slasher it feels different and when we're actually seeing the past unfold instead of hearing people talk about what they think happened based on books and rumors and whatever you weren't thinking about it in quite the same way. Plus it's still pretty gay and that's cool. Now when I look back at the trilogy as a whole I feel differently than I did as I watched the pieces individually. Both one and three and two and three complement each other pretty well but parts one and two just don't. Especially in this kind of release schedule and that's not really the filmmakers fault it was not meant to be released like this. Again the films had already completed production before Netflix was even involved but it emphasizes both the benefits and drawbacks of the continued blurring of lines between cinema and TV miniseries. And while I guess I am curious about that inevitable tease for a continuation of the Fear Street cinematic universe I'm much more interested in the next evolution of this experiment. 7.5 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Liam Knipe, Willow, I Am The Sword, Tim O, Riley Zimmerman and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video that's great if not oh well if you wanna see more please subscribe. Hope to see you in the next one.