Review of Fear Street: 1994 (2021) by Ahmedaiman1999 — 03 Jul 2021

With a masked killer and piled-up dead bodies spurting buckets galore of blood, the first installment in the trilogy that will be released weekly over the course of July screams at you that it will be crammed with 90's slasher sub-genre tropes to the hilt. And it is. The story zeros in on a group of teens living in a the town of Shadyside, which is in a feud with the neighboring town of Sunnyvale, with an advantage to the latter due to the stigma that surrounds Shadyside for being notorious for a bloodstained history of murders. The plot takes ages to actually kick off, as I think the movie got carried away quite a bit in laying out its 90s-inspired setting. Our teenage heroes are: Deena (Kiana Madeira), who, despite witnessing an accident, spends a big chunk of the movie in denial of the real threat, underestimating it and regarding it as a series of pranks. Her brother, Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.), is a nerd, internet-obsessed introvert who's a firm believer that what happens in the town is an entailment of darker secrets. Accordingly, he spends his time tracing the murders over the history, attempting to put the pieces together. Additionally, there are Kate (Julia Rehwald) and Simon (Fred Hechinger), classmates who serve as the comic relief characters at first before the story takes a darker, more earnest turn in its second half. Things improves significantly from there onwards. We finally get a glimpse at the lore the other two parts would expand on. But it's how the film unfolds is what impressed me for it somewhat managed to dodge the traps similar films that try to capture the characteristic features of a genre in a certain era it pays an homage to fall into: either ending up being a mere flimsy imitation of the movies in question or a self-serious film that tries too hard to keep things on a light footing.

First, I think it's a pretty smart decision that of taking a seamless diversion in its general tone from a full-on cheesy horror flick to a more serious and more dramatically hefty one while keeping on the campiness with no skimping on jump scares, juicy blood splatter, rapid zoom-ins, to name a few, to the last minute, as well as occult and possession (sorta!!) elements, which are even at the core of the plot. That's not to mention a plethora of references to classic horror films such as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Jaws, as well as an allusion to The Shining and the door-breaking axe scene, but that's beside the point, anyway. Secondly, and as faithful to the 90s era as it is, the movie doesn't shy away from borrowing the distinct Stranger Things-approach that has been the go to for any film lately that tries to balance out the dread of horror films with a nostalgic flavor, the thing that also, somehow, heightens the intense spooky moments and renders them quite unsettling, due to the discordance between the warm ambiance — that of nostalgia — that prevails the scene and the gory, shocking happenings that penetrate it. Finally, in its exploration of the mythology, the movie clearly takes a page or two from the modern horror films that revived the genre in the recent years. However, with the exception of some twists, the story is very predictable and also has a formulaic structure. And one could see how the arcs of the characters would wind up from a mile. To end on a positive note, the soundtrack is chock-full of cool, adeptly implemented needle drops.