Fear Street: 1666 (2021)
Directed by Leigh Janiak
In 1666, a colonial town is gripped by a hysterical witch-hunt that has deadly consequences for centuries to come, and it's up to teenagers in 1994 to finally put an end to their town's curse, before it's too late.
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3 films that influenced Fear Street: 1666
What critics say influenced Fear Street: 1666
Fear Street: 1666 has no such referents, but its visual aesthetic and tone do match up with other period horror films, like Gareth Evans’ Apostle or Robert Eggers’ The Witch .
If “1994” evoked “Scream,” and “1978” was reminiscent of “Friday the 13th,” “1666” feels kin to “The Witch.”
The cool-toned, grey-flecked palette and stark approach to gore seems borrowed from 2015’s The Witch .
Possibly the most dramatic of the films, “1666” transplants the characters from 1994 into a period set gothic horror setting reminiscent of Robert Eggers groundbreaking film “The Witch.”
The scares of 1666 are the very best of Fear Street thanks to both its creepy setting of a repressive Puritan colony and the way it ditches the slasher format of the previous two films in favor of more supernatural frights, pulling from works like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or Robert Eggers’ The Witch and incorporating similar themes of patriarchal violence and religious hysteria.
1666 is a slight departure from the horror trend pattern of the last two films, but we’re still in subgenre territory, hitting up contemporary folk horror in the vein of Robert Eggers’ The Witch , colored with a sense of teen angst that’s closer to 1994 ’s Kevin Williamson-adjacent trappings.
(The allusions have actually grown more obscure as the series progresses: A sequence featuring our heroine navigating a tunnel with a headlamp brings to mind the climax of “Kill List,” Ben Wheatley’s infinitely disturbing sophomore feature.)
The actor bears a striking resemblance to Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler during the modern sequences but, here, he’s reminiscent of the great Irish actor Emmett Scanlan, which is a real slight considering the unforgivably terrible attempts at Irish accents on display from the largely American cast.