Fear Street: 1666

Review by Josh Slater-Williams @jslaterwilliams

Directed by

Leigh Janiak

Starring

Ashley Zukerman Gillian Jacobs Kiana Madeira

Anticipation.

Must be the season of the witch.

Enjoyment.

Like an occult horror version of Back to the Future Part III. Your mileage may vary.

In Retrospect.

A very satisfying conclusion to this time-travelling trilogy experiment.

Netflix’s time-skipping horror trilogy reaches a satisfying conclusion via a 17th-century Sarah Fier origin story.

In covering each entry in director Leigh Janiak’s interconnected Fear Street trilogy as they drop weekly on Netflix, it’s been relatively easy to be vague with plot details. That said, the fun and freaky final instalment, subtitled 1666, is near impossible to discuss without spoiling some threads left dangling from parts one and two. So, to paraphrase Fear Street author RL Stine’s better-known horror series, reader beware…

At the close of the second film, the first film’s protagonist, Deena (Kiana Madeira), thought she’d ended the centuries-long curse of avenging witch Sarah Fier by reuniting her severed hand with her buried body. But when her own blood drips onto the remains, Deena is subconsciously transported back to 1666, shortly before the area’s first horrific massacre and Sarah’s mutilation and hanging for witchcraft.

Madeira plays Sarah in the 1666-set stretch of the film, though not as Deena possessing her mind and body; occasionally we get flashes of actor Elizabeth Scopel, who plays the ‘real’ Sarah. This artistic choice is seemingly done to draw comparisons with Deena’s plight in her own timeline, with her girlfriend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) currently possessed in 1994. The centrepiece lesbian romance is one of the more refreshing elements of this horror series, and 1666 is the most explicitly queer text of the trilogy. It seems Sarah’s designation as a sinner might have been due to her love of another woman, rather than dark magic.

The film’s primary setting may be a completely different century, but the device of having various familiar faces return to play new characters, some of whom are direct ancestors of those they played earlier in the trilogy, can’t help but bring to mind Back to the Future Part III. That is heightened further by most of the residents of ‘Union’, as the town is known in 1666, having Irish accents, in the grand tradition of Michael J Fox as Seamus McFly.

Not to spoil when and how it happens, but the film naturally has to go back to the 1994 timeline at some point. And with that jump comes one of the trilogy’s funniest moments, the flashing of another title card: ‘Fear Street 1994 Part 2’. Any film nerd who insists that the last title card to appear on screen is the real name of the movie will either be appalled or delighted by this development; a new entry in a canon that also features John Carter/John Carter of Mars and It/It Chapter One.

Speaking of It, that particular Stephen King story comes across as a direct influence on the exciting final act of this film. But while a gruesome supernatural entity below Shadyside is the physical manifestation of a town’s poisoning across centuries, summoning reanimated murderers for a final showdown with Deena and her ragtag group of defenders, the central big bad figure who has to be taken down to end the systemic rot for good is an all too human evil.

Published 16 Jul 2021

Tags: Fear Street Fear Street: 1666 Leigh Janiak Netflix

Anticipation.

Must be the season of the witch.

Enjoyment.

Like an occult horror version of Back to the Future Part III. Your mileage may vary.

In Retrospect.

A very satisfying conclusion to this time-travelling trilogy experiment.

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