There are certain characters that don’t make it past the first act in a horror movie. Black, queer or female characters who are not ‘the final girl’ are rarely the protagonist and even more infrequently make it alive to the end, but Fear Street does something different.
The horror trilogy, coming to Netflix across three Fridays in July, is billed as the horror event of the season. It’s bringing the fun, Friday night multiplex vibes back into the slasher genre.
The story, adapted from R.L. Stine’s teen horror series of books of the same name, is set in two fictional towns: the affluent Sunnyvale and Shadyside, their twin town, best known for its history of breeding mass murderers. The three Fear Street films tell one overarching story across three time periods: the first is set in 1994, where a series of undead serial killers start massacring a group of local teens; the second looks back at a camp massacre from 1978; and the final one takes the story to 1666, to the origin of the legend of Sarah Fier, the hanged witch that has become the emblem of Shadyside. All of this wrapped in a neon-soaked look with a soundtrack that’s ripped straight from the mixtapes of a 90s alt-girl.
At the heart of this new trilogy of terror is a trio of young outsiders. There’s Deena (Kiana Madeira), an angsty teen still pining for her ex-girlfriend Sam (Olivia Welch), who has recently moved to the Sunnyvale and hooked up with a jock, and Deena’s brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.), a loner who prefers the company of AOL message boards about serial killers to real people.
In any other horror movie, these characters wouldn’t make it to the second act. In Fear Street, they are the heroes.
Drawing from both 70s and 90s slasher classics like Halloween and Scream (the first scene pulls a Drew Barrymore on us, except this time it’s with Maya Hawke) and teen-gang adventure films from the 80s like The Goonies, Fear Street 1994 has its characters at the centre, and gives them all equal importance. “Us being outsiders made us stronger as a unit,” Benjamin says, whose character begins as a painfully shy serial killer nerd. Because they filmed all three films simultaneously, the cast bonded naturally, and became incredibly close. They still text each other to this day.
The good vibes between them are palpable in our interview as much as they are on the screen. The most important chemistry check had to be between Kiana and Olivia. Their characters’ love story is the central relationship of Fear Street. After going through several individual auditions, they had to do a six-hour chemistry read together. Everyone else they could chance it on, but not Deena and Sam. “There were several other actors,” remembers Madeira, “but when Olivia and I went in together, it just felt different. It felt special.”
When we first meet her, Deena starts off heartbroken and angsty, “living in this bubble of doom and feeling like she’s only attracting bad things” Kiana says. She plays her with intense, angry energy throughout the whole trilogy until she comes to the realisation that “she is enough to overcome everything that she’s dealing with. She’s not the problem, but she is actually the solution.”
To get the cast into the 90s mood of Fear Street 1994, director Leigh Janiak gave them films and a playlist to get them to understand “the horror culture we were stepping into”, Benjamin says. On the set, if a scene wasn’t quite clicking, she’d call the cast over to her laptop and play them a song: “This song is for this scene”, they remember, “It wouldn’t be on the soundtrack but she would say ‘It needs to feel like that’.”
While Fear Street is a sweet ode to the teenage underdog, with moments of real sweetness, it balances those with “some of the craziest deaths you’ve ever seen”, says Olivia. There is a smorgasbord of serial killers from Shadyside’s history, each creepier than the next: a pastor who took out the eyes of kids, a 1950s young woman who sang while she murdered her boyfriend, a disfigured milkman that stabs suburban housewives, and a towering, masked killer called Nightwing who genuinely creeped out the cast.
Olivia, who plays closeted cheerleader Sam, is a self-confessed horror nerd, and loved every minute of filming because it showed her the trickery of the genre. “‘This is the greatest day of my life!’” she says, recalling her reaction to the shoot. “To see them bring in different jugs of blood and decide which colour blood we like the best? It was so fun to see how meticulous everything is and how these really little things in horror movies are really thought-out”.
All the sweetness aside, Fear Street is a teen horror trilogy that doesn’t skimp on the horror. There are a handful of scenes in Fear Street 1994 that will satisfy the gore hounds (we’ll never be able to look at a bread slicer in the same way). The first instalment of the trilogy is a perfect mash-up of 90s slashers and grungy comedies, like an I Know What You Did Last Summer crossover with Reality Bites, with so many visual, narrative and musical references to horror film history that it’ll be fodder for YouTube video essayists for months.
And with Kiana, Olivia and Benjamin, Fear Street introduces a new generation of scream queens (and a king) to the horror genre. “It’s an honour, really,” says Kiana, “but it’s funny because I can’t scream. I lose my voice so easily”.
Even having made a whole trilogy of horror films, they’re all adamant that Olivia would be the one to survive till the end, as their designated horror scholar: “The idea of dying any of the deaths of Fear Street 1994 makes me want to survive!”
Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is out now on Netflix. Fear Street Part 2: 1978 airs on 9 July and Fear Street Part 3: 1666 airs on 16 July .