Fear Street: 1994 (2021)
Directed by Leigh Janiak
After a series of brutal slayings, a teen and her friends take on an evil force that's plagued their notorious town for centuries.
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Much like the soundtrack serves as a direct homage to the music at the time, the overall experience, even down to the narrative and directing style themselves, serves as a faithful tribute to the teen-oriented slashers at the time, specifically Scream .
But what’s old will always be new again in Hollywood, and just as Scream affectionately skewered (and briefly revived) the disposable body-count horror of the ’80s, so now is Wes Craven’s watershed hit inspiring its own wistful copycats.
There are some meta echoes banging about: There are sideways references to Jason Voorhees and those nutty kids from “Scream” (director and co-writer of all three films, Leigh Janiak, helmed some episodes of the short-lived “Scream” TV series), and there’s a recreated sequence from “The Shining.”
Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak is clearly paying homage to Drew Barrymoore’s opening cameo in Scream , right down to the masked killer’s black hooded robe and the slow-motion shot of the murderer chasing down his final victim (Maya Hawke) just as salvation seems nigh.
Set in Shadyside, the cursed sister town to neighboring Sunnyvale (imagine if Tree Hill shared a border with Silent Hill), the film opens with a murder in a mall that pretty closely mirrors the opening murder of Scream, down to the recreation of a few of that scene’s iconic shots.
Janiak sets her stall out early with a terrific cold open that homages Scream with a certain Stranger Things star in the place of Drew Barrymore.
The homages to the '90s era of self-aware slasher movies, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Faculty , can be seen throughout 1994.
“Goosebumps” this is not, “Fear Street Part One: 1994” gets the series off to a fun, blood soaked start, paying homage to the slasher films of the nineties (“Scream,” “Urban Legend,” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer”) and curating a solid foundation for the sprawling world-building set to take place in subsequent installments.
Kevin Williamson, screenwriter of Scream , clearly read his share of teen-courting paperbacks, including the one he adapted into I Know What You Did Last Summer .
It's serendipitous that the film opens in a mall with Maya Hawke from Stranger Things, a show that draws on artistic and narrative influences of the 1980s the way Fear Street honors I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream, and other '90s horror hits.
By all appearances, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a conventional contemporary riff on ‘90s horror classics like I Know What You Did Last Summer , The Faculty , and Scream , period-accurate needle drops and all.
“1978” is about a summer camp massacre, à la 1980’s “Friday the 13th.”
Janiak, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Phil Graziadei even tries to get a little meta by referencing popular horror films (the 1982’s Poltergeist happens to be one of them).
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There are echoes of Halloween ’s besieged babysitters, Halloween 2 's hospital setting, and Friday the 13th ’s camp-slaying mayhem (though that one will play out more explicitly in Fear Street Part 2: 1978 , which drops next week).
The homages to the '90s era of self-aware slasher movies, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Faculty , can be seen throughout 1994.
By all appearances, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a conventional contemporary riff on ‘90s horror classics like I Know What You Did Last Summer , The Faculty , and Scream , period-accurate needle drops and all.
There are some meta echoes banging about: There are sideways references to Jason Voorhees and those nutty kids from “Scream” (director and co-writer of all three films, Leigh Janiak, helmed some episodes of the short-lived “Scream” TV series), and there’s a recreated sequence from “The Shining.”
(The ending includes a cool stinger in the vein of “Back to the Future Part II” setting up the July 9th release of “Fear Street Part Two: 1978”).
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Without going too far into spoiler territory, all of the legendary murderers have now risen and are prowling Shadyside, and while at first, the proceedings feel more like Halloween or a slasher flick of your choosing, if anything, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is paying respect to the still-to-this-day astonishing special-effects of 1990s classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
“1994” has hints of “Scream” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” for example.