Mark Reviews Movies: FEAR STREET: 1666

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 16, 2021

The central mystery of what has been happening in the town of Shadyside is answered in the first half of Fear Street: 1666, the final and most ambitious chapter in co-writer/director Leigh Janiak's horror trilogy. Everything comes together in the first hour or so of this film. With all of that in place, Janiak finally has a chance to pay off the series' overarching narrative, its final confrontations, and, most importantly, its willingness to pay homage to and play with the characters, clichés, and killers within various eras and subgenres of horror.

In other words, we basically get two movies in one this time. The first is fine—a creepy and atmospheric tale of religious zealotry and Satanic panic during the colonial days of yore. The second is fun in a way that Fear Street: 1994, the first movie in this series, attempted but didn't quite achieve.

The initial plot kind of follows the narrative spirit of Fear Street: 1978, in that it's a self-contained tale, revolving around and expanding upon the series' established mythology. As those who have been following the series know, we last left Deena (Kiana Madeira) in between two time periods. Having discovered the location of a witch's severed hand and re-united the appendage with the rest of the witch's body, Deena was magically or psychically transported to the year 1666—and into the body of Sarah Fier (Elizabeth Scopel), the witch whose curse has devastated the town of Shadyside over the course of the ensuing centuries.

Now (well, then), Deena is Sarah, the daughter of a farmer in a settlement called Unity (later to be split into Shadyside and the much less cursed, far more affluent town of Sunnyvale). The names may be different in this time period, but the faces are familiar. Sarah's brother Henry is in the form of Deena's brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.). Deena's girlfriend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), still under the murder-inducing influence of the curse in 1994, occupies the form of Sarah's secret love Hannah, the local pastor's daughter.

Other characters, from Deena's present or the relative past of the slaughter at a summer camp in 1978, appear as settlement folks (The summer camp nurse is a witchcraft-obsessed widow, played by Jordana Spiro, in the woods, and a drunken accuser, played by McCade Slye, looks very much like the axe-wielding killer at the same camp). Most importantly, the present-day Goode brothers, Sheriff Nick (Ashley Zukerman) and mayor Will (Matthew Zuk), are seen as their Goode ancestors, with the former occupying the role of Solomon, the man to whom Sarah is unofficially betrothed.

If some of this sounds confusing, it is to a degree. Once again adapting the books of R.L. Stine (and still not for kids looking for goosebumps), Janiak and fellow screenwriters Phil Graziadei (returning from the previous two installments) and Kate Trefry (new to the series with this entry) have probably laid out a whole history and rationale for why each of these characters from the future appear as these particular characters in the past, but it's perhaps best not to consider the logic too much.

Thankfully, Janiak focuses on slowly escalating a story of forbidden love, against the settlement's increasing paranoia that someone has made a deal with the devil, causing all sorts of blight and misfortune and murder to occur in Unity. Like with the second film, the third one is clever in the way it doles out exposition that's important to the bigger picture of this narrative, without sacrificing the purpose and point of its isolated story.

Here, then, is a tale of religious fervor and resulting oppression, with someone spotting Sarah and Hannah cavorting in the woods and spreading rumors that their sexual escapade held some evil intent. The suspects of who started the gossip are many, and the bigger question, in regards to the series as a whole, is that, if Sarah is innocent of starting the supernatural mess in the settlement, who is responsible for all of the carnage then and in the long period since?

None of that, of course, should be revealed here. It can be said that the answer is rather satisfying, as it pertains to the story in the past (which is all about jealous or insecure men trying to project their own shortcomings and failures on women) and to the soon-to-be ongoing story in 1994 (Janiak, rather cheekily, gives us a second title card about halfway through the film, complete with the secondary subtitle "Part 2"). The revelation also makes clear a thought that has been beneath this series from the start: The Shadyside/Sunnyvale rivalry is more about class and privilege than it is about some olden curse.

The second half of the film, set once again in 1994, finishes the larger story and, more vitally, allows Janiak to dig into the first movie's central conceit: resurrected killers, representing different eras and genres of horror movies, stalking a group of smart and resourceful protagonists. The result is a fairly dynamic climax—a game of cat-and-mouse, which turns into a chase through some subterranean caverns, while a battle royal between some familiar slashers unfolds amidst the mall where the whole story began.

Janiak's trilogy may have stumbled at the start, but this entry serves as an eerie tale of fanaticism and a better version of what the filmmakers tried to do with the first installment. Fear Street: 1666 may not stand on its own (It never could, obviously), but it's a twisted and cunningly enjoyable conclusion.

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