Fear Street movies are dark, R-rated slashers that are entirely unsuitable for children.
That said, fans of slasher cinema have an ax to grind with the most recent installment. Where the first film in the series, Fear Street 1994, brought viewers back to the world of the mid-‘90s slasher revival, Fear Street 1978 took things even further back to the eponymous year when John Carpenter’s original Sleepaway Camp, Fear Street 1978 fails to recreate one important detail of these genre favorites.
Fear Street 1978 draws heavily from the slashers of the 1980s, including the franchise-spawning Stephen King, slashers are Fear Street 1978’s main horror influence. Details the sequel lifts from the Friday the 13th franchise range from the killer ending up with a sack mask to him attacking a t-smoking girl immediately after a bout of pre-marital sex. However, while Fear Street 1978 does get suitably gory when the killings begin, the movie’s killer (possessed counselor Tommy Slater) almost exclusively uses his ax to dispatch victims and nothing else. This is in contrast to the slasher heyday, where victims could be dispatched in a variety of creative ways. For instance, in the average Friday the 13th sequel, Jason Voorhees used everything from knives to corkscrews to sleeping bags and even his bare hands.
Fear Street 1978, sadly, lacks this element, making the kills somewhat repetitive. This issue is exacerbated by the characters Tommy chooses to kill. Part of what makes the later Friday the 13th movies more fun than scary is that the sequels made a point of establishing boorish, obnoxious characters whose eventual demise the audience was encouraged to root for. Early on in its runtime, 1978 appears to be following this approach, setting up Sunnyvale campers as a group of unpleasant, classist bullies whose eventual gory karmic comeuppance seems inevitable. However, Fear Street 1978 subverts this expectation by instead killing off Shadyside campers who were either likable, well-meaning figures or side characters barely seen/heard before their deaths, while the insufferable denizens of Sunnyvale go largely unharmed.
Where the original Sleepaway Camp saw its killer dispatch a predatory camp cook and a snobbish bully via a vat of boiling oil or curling tongs respectively, Fear Street 1978 doesn’t mete out any such creative deaths to its most deserving characters. Some of the Fear Street trilogy’s scariest villains appear during the movie’s climax, but it is only to menace the last two survivors and the bulk of the killings are unspectacular ax murders of undeserving kids. This approach does make Fear Street 1978 memorably subversive and may well be explained by the third film, but for now, it’s also a touch repetitive and surprisingly far from fun for a retro slasher throwback.
