This article is an automatic translation. The original text was published in Portuguese at Insolita Magazine: https://revistas.intercom.org.br/index.php/insolita/article/view/4214
You can also acess the Portuguese version in this link: https://oca.observatorio.uff.br/?p=2633
Abstract
Fear Street is a horror film trilogy directed by Leigh Janiak, released by Netflix in July 2021. The work brings contributions to the genre by bringing peripheral bodies underrepresented in horror to the forefront and focusing on themes about the treatment of their bodies in society. In addition, its unique structure and release strategy – a mix between series and film trilogy – allows Leigh Janiak to focus on the overlaps and peculiarities of three different subgenres: the suburban fantastic cinema, the slasher and the American gothic. In this article, we will delve into, based on generic and feminist criticism, how Fear Street subverts its viewers’ expectations by moving between different subgenres and by basing it on perspectives underrepresented by hegemonic cinema.
Keywords: Fear Street; Horror; Film genres; Gender Studies; Streaming
Introduction
In 2021, Netflix released the Fear Street horror trilogy on its streaming platform. These are films based on a book collection by R.L. Stine (author of Goosebumps) composed by Fear Street: 1994, Fear Street: 1978, and Fear Street: 1666 (figure 1), all directed by Leigh Janiak, and released on the platform within a week of each other. However, this release was not the initial planning of its producers: the project was scheduled for release in 2020 by Fox, but it was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic [1]. Once in Netflix’s hands, the joint release of the three films seems to have been a strategy suited to the platform’s exhibition model, being able to be watched as a series in three chapters in a project entitled “The Summer of Fear”.
This article will work on how the trilogy makes connections between three different (sub)genres[2] of Horror cinema: suburban fantastic, slasher, and American Gothic. In this sense, we will both emphasize its semantic and syntactical proximities, demonstrating how the “interchangeability” of elements between different (sub)genres can bring new possibilities to the Horror genre. We will focus on the central thread of the trilogy: physical violence and, above all, morality imposed on the female body. It is worth remembering that the portrait of women in Horror cinema (mainly in the slasher) is widely studied by researchers, bringing multiple discussions about gender, performativity, sexuality…
Figure 1: The poster of the three films complement each other, demonstrating the narrative unity of the plot. However, the color palette reflects the different styles of the three periods and the three subgenres portrayed. (Source: imdb.com)
The trilogy tells the story of the town of Shadyside, Ohio, supposedly haunted by the witch Sarah Fiers, who died in the 17th century. According to the legend, every 15 year a tragedy occurs: a Shadyside’s dweller is possessed by the spirit of Fiers and begins a killing spree. Such events prevent the city from being able to develop economically and socially, throwing a sinister aura over it, especially when compared to its rival city: the rich and developed Sunnyvale. The latest killing occurred in 1994, when a masked young man murdered seven people in a mall, being killed by a police officer, Deputy Nick Goode.
Deena and her friends get involved in the plot when Sam, the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend, finds the witch’s skeleton. After such an event, assassins who have passed through Shadyside materialize to kill the girl. It’s up to Deena’s group to protect Sam as they try to end the curse once and for all. According to the legend, the witch Sarah Fiers will only rest when her hand – severed – is reunited with her body. After more deaths, the first film ends inconclusively – and it’s up to the protagonists to listen to the report of the survivor of the penultimate Shadyside massacre: a story told in Fear Street: 1978, a slasher spent in a summer camp. There we follow the story of how Ziggy survived the serial killers (losing his sister in the process) and found the hand of Fiers.
From the adult Ziggy’s report, Deena and her friends discover the location of the severed limb and manage to reunite it with the witch’s body. However, instead of ending the “curse”, the protagonist is mentally transported to the 17th century, in the Puritan colony of Union (which preceded the cities of Shadyside and Sunnyvale), being able to relive the last days of Sarah Fiers. This is the first half of the narrative in Fear Street: 1666. In it we discover that the curse was actually invoked by one man – Solomon Goode, who made a satanic pact to achieve economic success. In return, he offers “the soul” of Union – causing its residents to be affected every 15 years by satanic possessions. Upon being discovered by Fiers, he incriminates the young woman as a witch – claiming that she is responsible for corrupting the colony, her sexuality being used as an indication of her guilt: the young woman was a lesbian, just like Deena.
Going back to 1994 (the movie even makes a mark in the middle of the 3rd movie – calling it “Fear Street: 1994 – Part 2”) – Deena, Ziggy and their friends discover the real culprit in the most recent tragedy: Deputy Nick Goode , descendant of Solomon. Deena finds that for generations, the Goode family has continued to conjure up the devil in exchange for economic success – including being directly responsible for the wealth of Sunnyvale and the tragedies of Shadyside. In a final confrontation, Deena kills Goode and ends the curse once and for all, and can do justice to the soul and history of Sarah Fiers.
Suburban Fantastic in Fear Street: 1994
The first film in the trilogy starts as a typical slasher. A young woman, played by Maya Hawke (from Stranger Things), is chased by a psychopath wearing a skull mask in an empty mall. Until the last moment, we believe she will get away with it. However, a knife stuck in her chest seals her fate. For horror movie aficionados, the reference is clear: Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) – the work that spawned a new cycle of slashers in the 1990s. Maya Hawke is the most famous actress of the entire cast, and her death in the film’s first minutes is surprising for the audience as it happened with Drew Barrymore in Scream. Here, the repetition of the formula gains tonnes of homage. However, not everything is repetition: the work reserves a surprise – unlike Panic, in the sequel to Fear Street: 1994, the murderer is killed, and his identity revealed.
Such surprise, more than narrative, is genre based. Fear Street: 1994 is not a slasher, but an authentic example ofsuburban fantastic. The subgenre conceptualized by Angus McFadzean (2017; 2019) from Altman’s (1984) syntactic/semantic conceptualization refers to works that semantically unite the American suburb/small town setting with elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction, while syntactically they work with the coming-of-age narrative (original from the coming of age dramas) with the hero’s melodrama (typical of fantasy cinema). This is the case of works such as E.T. – The Extraterrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985), and the most recent Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2016-).
It is worth mentioning that the interlocution of the Suburban Fantastic with horror is not new, as is the case with works such as Poltergeist (Toby Hopper, 1982), Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985) and It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990), films that received remakes in the 2010s, and that are unequivocal examples of the subgenre. Important to point out that R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps was adapted as a suburban fantastic film in 2015 (directed by Rob Letterman) and 2018, with Goosebumps: Haunted Halloween (directed by Ari Sandel).
In Fear Street: 1994, director Leigh Janiak uses this common denominator (Horror) to play with the expectations of her audience as she moves between slasher and suburban fantastic. Not only in the already commented first scene, but also in its final action sequence: with the spectator already aware that it is suburban fantastic film, and in the expectation that the film follows the narrative conventions of the subgenre, we are surprised by the bloody death of one of the members of the CCP[3] – mutilated in a meat slicer. Here not only the violent death of the character surprises but the visuality of the scene – something that we would expect to see in a slasher and that ends up catching us off guard, increasing its surprise factor. This strategy, of course, uses the subversion of Steve Neale’s concept of genres, which, according to him, are specific systems of expectations and hypotheses that viewers bring to the cinematographic experience (2000, p.46). Here, expectations and assumptions are challenged when moving between subgenres, even though they still maintain Horror as their main genre.
These slasher elements are far from Fear Street: 1994’s only breaches of expectation from the suburban fantastic subgenre. The main one, without a doubt, is the protagonist: a black and lesbian woman. It is worth mentioning that androcentrism, whiteness, and heteronormativity are hallmarks of almost all the films of the suburban fantastic subgenre – since their conception in the 1980s, which have only begun to be deconstructed more emphatically in recent years. Not coincidentally, it is Netflix itself that has been investing the most in this deconstruction in films like See You Yesteday (Stefen Bristol, 2019) and Vampires vs The Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020).
It is interesting to point out a natural dialogue between the streaming platform and suburban fantastic as a subgenre – the meta-referentiality present in the reuse of actors. In the Fear Street trilogy, for example, in addition to Maya Hawks, actress Sady Sink and actor Randy Havens from Stranger Things are also part of the cast. The director herself, Leigh Janiak, jokes that she competed in the use of nostalgic elements with her husband, one of the directors of Stranger Things[4], since they directed their works in parallel. It is worth mentioning that Bejamin Flores Jr., aka Josh, also stars in a CCP in Rim of the World (McG, 2019), another film of the subgenre on Netflix.
Another oxygenation that the film brings to suburban fantastic is to the decade in which it points its nostalgia – no longer to the 1980s (McFADZEAN, 2019) – but the 1990s. This appear in the soundtrack (with music by the Pixies, Garbage, Cypress Hill, Prodigy, and Radiohead) and the incorporation of typical elements from the beginnings of the digital period (figure 2), such as pagers, computers, online chats, and video games. This decade choice, in turn, represents a detachment from the analogic culture of the 1980s, although still echoing the technostalgia as conceptualized by Cormie, Castellano and Meimaridis (2019). However, it is noteworthy that the inexistence of the cell phone (which would only become popular in the 2000s) facilitates some of the main narrative developments of suburban fantastic – such as the lack of family control over the whereabouts of their children and the difficulty in contacting the authorities.
Figure 2: Josh is the character most linked to technology in the plot (being even called a nerd by his colleagues). Through him, we see the main references to the technology of the period. (Source: Frame from Fear Street 1994)
It is still too recent to make further theorizations, but we can assume that this “decade shift” indicates a referential change of the subgenre itself within the reflexive cycle that began in 2010 (McFADZEAN, 2019). In other words, the 2010s were marked by multiple films and series of suburban fantastic set in the late 1970s and 1980s, such as Hot Tube Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010), Super 8 (J. J. Abrams, 2011) , Stranger Things, It – Chapter 1 (Andy Muschietti, 2016), Summer of 84 (Anouk Whissel, François Simard, Yoan-Karl Whissell, 2018) and Bumblebee (Travis Knight, 2018). This choice, of course, would be following its own homage to the genesis of the subgenre that took place in that decade as explained by the “nostalgia pendulum” [5] – the natural increase in remakes after 30 years of the original production. This pendulum occurs because the generation that had those films as a reference in their youth is now old enough to honor them in their productions.
Now, entering 2020, one can imagine that, according to the nostalgia pendulum, an increase in nostalgic suburban fantastic works from the 1990s is expected. It is worth remembering that multiple classics of the subgenre are from this decade, such as Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1991), Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993), Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995) and the series Eeirie, Indiana (José Rivera and Karl Schaefer, NBC, 1991-1993). Taking advantage of the discussion on nostalgia, we now turn to the second chapter of the trilogy to discuss how it approaches one of the most meta-referential subgenres of horror.
The Slasher in Fear Street: 1978
If Fear Street: 1994 deceives its viewers by pretending to be a slasher, Fear Street: 1978 does not do the same. The second film in the series follows practically all the narrative points of the subgenre formula listed by Carol Clover (2015) – including its main semantic elements: the killer and his weapon, the horrible place, the victims, the shock, the fixation for the body and, of course, the final girl (a concept coined by Clover in 1992). I propose, in this topic, to dwell on each of these points raised by Clover to discuss how Leigh Janiak’s film works with them (and, in a way, subverts them).
Let’s start with the figure of the assassin, to which Janiak has already shown an interest in altering some of his conventions. It’s not that he doesn’t include some classic characteristics of his villains – the killer follows the concepts written by Clover: a man who uses a weapon that needs physical proximity (in this case an axe) and with issues related to sexuality (the film gives evidence that he is a virgin). The big difference is that the film does not follow the formula of the slashers of the last decades and uses the formula of the father of the subgenre: Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), not making a mystery of the killer’s identity or his motives for the killing. The killer is Tommy, Ziggy’s older sister’s boyfriend, and whose “mask” (a burlap sack) is not a “disguise”. The motives, of course, are part of the “Fiers’ curse”, that can affect any resident of Shadyside. The “curiosity” generated by the film is in finding out how Ziggy will survive, and its surprise factor is on account of discovering that Ziggy changed his identity with his sister, who was killed in the attack.
As for the “horrible place”, another element of the slasher, the film pays more homage to the subgenre: a summer camp. I remember that this is the setting of two of the most famous films of the subgenre – Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham, 1980) and Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983). The difference, however, is the second “horrible place” in which the film takes place, which pays homage to narratives more common to suburban fantastic. These are labyrinthine caves that pass under the camp and are navigated only by maps and refer to films such as The Goonies, It and Stranger Things.
The victims and the shock are another point that draw attention in Fear Street: 1978, for its subversion to the conventions of the (sub)genre. Clover (2015, p.48) emphasizes that sexually active young people and/or recreational drug users are the primary target of murderers in the history of slashers. The secondary target would be the authorities (such as police officers) inefficient in their role of protecting society. It is worth mentioning that both types of victims are historically aligned with Reaganism (TROY, 2005; EHRMAN, 2005) marked by liberal economic rhetoric, the war on drugs, and the return of a great conservatism in the discourse regarding sexual freedoms. In other words, while young people are killed (apparently) for being immoral in the face of the hegemonic discourse of the American middle class, the murder of adults is an inference to the fallibility of the State. It’s worth noting that Regan coined the expression, “The nine scariest words anyone can say are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (SIROTA, 2011).
In Fear Street: 1978 these maxims regarding victims are not reproduced. Or, at least, not in its entirety: Joan, a cheerful resident of Shadyside, is viscerally killed after lighting a post-sex joint. However, her death seems more like a reference to the old movies, being, in fact, the only (brief) nudity scene of the entire trilogy. However, children, portrayed without a hint of malice, are also violently killed (figure 3). And as much as the film reserves the possibility of being explicit only with the murder of older characters, I remember that the death of children is extremely rare in slashers. In Fear Street: 1978, Leigh Janiak demonstrates that there is no motive in these deaths, they are completely random and, therefore, remove any possibility of inferring guilt on the victim. In other words, a marijuana user is just as likely to be killed as a child who wants to make new friends. Death is no longer linked to the victim’s condition, and becomes linked only to the killer.
Figure 3: A child is killed by a serial killer. Unlike other deaths that are more graphic, this is the most graphic image of his murder. By victimizing a child, the work removes any moralizing component about the slasher’s victims. Source: Fear Street Frame 1978
Finally, it is precisely in terms of issues linked to the body and (gender) of Final Girl that the second film in the trilogy seems to cling the most to (sub)genre conventions. Clover points out that there is a “masculine coding” linked to the archetype of the final girl (2015, p.48): either by her name (occasionally neutral like Avery, Sidney or Chris), by her sexual reluctance, by her distance from other girls and /or for their interests hegemonically linked to masculinity. In Fear Street: 1978 such characteristics seem to be well divided between the two sisters: Ziggy and Cindy (showing not only the complementary nature of the two but also to generate doubts about which one will be the final girl). Within Clover’s reading, the syntax of the classic slashers cycle (1978 to the mid-1980s) would be marked by a transition of the protagonist between her femininity (punctuated by her vulnerability) to masculinity (the moment when she reacts to her persecutor ).
It is worth mentioning that Clover’s classic book comes, among other objectives, intending to demystify the reading that the Slasher naturally has a rhetoric of female empowerment and, thus, detaching itself from criticism of the inherently sexist elements of its construction. As the author points out, if the discourse is completely masculine, the final girl is not a woman “despite” the male audience, but precisely because of her (2015, p.53) – being seen primarily from the prism of male experience. For this reason, a careful reading is necessary with the ambiguous proposal that Fear Street: 1978 proposes, both in trying to honor the conventions of the subgenre and to subvert the bodies portrayed there.
David Green proposes, from a queer perspective, a reading that the Final Girl is actually the Finalizing Woman in the sense that she is usually the character who usually puts an end to the villain – usually portrayed as a virgin, sexually inert or transsexual. In this sense, the villain’s death would be the restoration of heteronormativity at the hands of the heterosexual woman (2011, p.173) who would avenge the death of sexually active young people. Although Fear Street: 1978 gives the possibility to establish this critical reading (after all, there are inferences that Tommy, the villain, is a virgin and that both Ziggy and Cindy are heterosexual) – it is worth considering at least two counterpoints. The first is Leigh Janiak’s and the production’s clear concern with casting and representing characters not only ethnically, but also sexually and generically diverse. The second is the recontextualization that the second film goes through after watching Fear Street: 1666, pointing out that the real villain of the plot is Nicky Goode: a straight, white, cis and upper-middle class man.
The American Gothic in Fear Street: 1666
At the end of Fear Street: 1978, Deena (in 1994) manages, based on Ziggy’s report, to reunite Sarah Fiers’ hand with her body. At that moment, the protagonist of the trilogy is sent directly to 1666, to experience the last days of Fiers. This narrative choice is very symbolic of the film’s intentions – which puts us, for the first time in the trilogy, to see reality through the eyes of the dead woman accused of witchcraft. It is worth remembering that the POV (point of view) is a prevalent instrument in horror (and especially in slashers) both to create identification with the protagonist (CLOVER, 2015, p.44) and to put us in the shoes of the villain (CLOVER, 2015, p.45). Here, the function is ambivalent – Sarah Fiers’ POV makes us identify with the supposed villain, by placing her as the protagonist, and, consequently, making us question whether she is in fact the antagonist of the trilogy.
I emphasize that the setting in the 17th century makes the film give up primarily honoring other films and starts referencing styles of literary origin, in this case, the American Gothic. Marked by the symbolic conflict between civilization and nature (and its ramifications as virtue and sin, morals and instinct, Christianity and paganism…) the subgenre evokes the main colonial anxieties of the United States: the need to inhabit the country’s “wild frontiers” and the consequent divine weight of having to “found the earthly utopia”. Berenice Murphy (2009, p.105-106) will make an interesting genealogy of the transition between European and American Gothic with the arrival of the Puritans. Murphy says the genre is guided by the settlers and pioneers’ creed of being chosen by God to create a new Jerusalem in the New World, that is, the possibility of building the perfect (and blessed) society on Earth.
In American Gothic, of course, such a society is doomed to failure – since evil will prevent the utopian aims of that community from being carried forward. It is at this point that American Gothic makes syntactic links with slasher and suburban fantastic: in all these subgenres, the “Other” (the uncivilized, or the one who has not assimilated the hegemonic values) is the one who threatens the status quo. It is important to point out that the American suburbs since their conception in the beginning of the 20th century, based on the rhetoric of the “American Dream” (COONTZ, 2000) have placed themselves in this position of “utopia” just as the settlers did with their settlements. It is also worth mentioning that the residents of the suburbs built from the 1950s onwards called themselves pioneers (Baxandall and Ewen, 2000, p.153) – evoking even more such parallelism. This connection is very clear in Poltergeist (Toby Hopper, 1982) – a film that represents the transition between Suburban Gothic and Suburban Fantastic (McFADZEAN, 2019). In Hopper’s film, it is the suburban sprawl over the green horizons that makes the Freeling family susceptible to being cursed (their house is built over a cemetery).
In Fear Street: 1666, the apprehensions of those pioneers with the “Other” (figure 4) precede supernatural events. In other words, evil precedes the curse. This concept is manifested, for example, in the discomfort that Hannah Miller’s mother has in her daughter’s relationship with Sarah Fiers, with the harassment that “Mad Thomas” makes to Fiers, the suspicions raised about adolescent behavior and, mainly, with the character of the “widow”. The “widow” is a woman excluded from the settlement and accused of being a “witch” who “drinks the blood of virgins” for having married a native. Not coincidentally, it’s another widower (ie, the representation of the family’s tragic breakup), Solomon Goode, who is the real culprit for cursing that land. It is the man who makes a pact with the devil cursing Union (who would later become Shadyside) in exchange for material benefits for himself and his descendants. Here, it is worth noting that, as we have seen in the previous films, such benefits are only aimed at ascending and maintaining the middle class – not being requests for unlimited power or wealth.
Figure 4: Sarah Fiers stands trial after being accused of having an affair with Hannah Miller. The scene above puts us in the character’s shoes, being targeted by the eyes of the residents. Source: Fear Street: 1666.
In other words, Fear Street: 1666 brings a reading that it was the white man, in his eagerness to ascend to the middle class (that is, to build the “American Dream”), who cursed the United States as a possibility of utopia. However, this curse was not for everyone, as the white man maintained his privileges over the centuries, but restricted to bodies treated as peripheral such as natives, blacks, women, and LGBTQIA+. Here, the figure of the witch (a lesbian) appears as a scapegoat for this process. It is worth remembering that this mythological figure, according to Merchant, was pursued as the incarnation of the “wild side” of nature (1980 in FEDERECI, 2017, p.366) – reverberating the dichotomy between civilization and nature made by the Gothic, but from a modern perspective: nature and (in)civilization.
In this sense, it is essential to make a relationship between the witch’s figure as a scapegoat with the reading proposed by Silvia Federici in O Calibã e a Bruxa (2017). The author points out that the myth of witchcraft came with the intention of a project of expropriation, a tactic that has some similarities with the rhetoric of “indigenous savagery” as a justification for the colonization process. In the case of women, expropriation not only took place from the appropriation of their work by men (within the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism) but also from the control of their reproductive process (2017, p.203). In the case of Fear Street: 1666, it is no wonder that Sarah Fiers, a lesbian (whose sexuality does not fit into the heteronormative reproductive model), is treated a witch.
In this sense, the work highlights how Sarah Fiers’ knowledge, while recognized by that society, is also what generates anxiety and fear. So, if in the first scene of Fear Street: 1666 we see Fiers performing a cesarean section on a sow, saving her life and that of her offspring, this refers to the fact that many witches were women with knowledge of reproductive control (FEDERICI, 2017. p.328). And it is this same knowledge that generates fear – first when it kills the same sow when it eats its offsprings – in a biological manifestation of the corruption of the land, typical of the Gothic (MORGAN, 2002, p.6). Then, when Fiers is accused of bewitching the shepherd who murdered twelve village children. Federici recalls that witches were historically accused of sacrificing children to the devil (2017, p.174) in a “literal” version of the reproductive crimes to which lesbians, connoisseurs of contraceptives and abortions and infertile women were accused.
After having her destiny defined by a white man – when she was accused of witchcraft, at the end of the first part of Fear Street: 1666 (before we return to the 20th century), it is remarkable that Leigh Janiak gives Sarah Fiers, her tragic heroine, some sort of agency over its own destiny. First, when she refuses to become Solomon’s wife, in an inference to not being subjugated to the hegemonic institution of the heteronormative family, rejecting the passivity and obedience that they tried to impose on her (FEDERICI, 2017, p.206) and then when she accepts to be treated as a witch to preserve her partner, Hannah Miller, from the same fate as her. In this sense, the character somehow escapes, even if minimally, from being a protagonist just by being “killed, raped, persecuted and intimidated” as has become common in the Horror genre. (CARDOSO, 2015). Thus, in Fear Street: 1666, declaring yourself a witch is not an act of villainy, but of sacrifice for others – as Deena learns at the end of her journey through the 17th century.
Fear Street 1994 – Part 2
As we go back to 1994, in the second half of Fear Street: 1666, the series’ slogan “Time changes, not evil” gains new understandings. It does not refer to the recurrence of serial killers in Shadyside – but to the constant cause of that evil. I am talking about a patriarchal and heteronormative middle class, capable of condemning other bodies to maintain themselves in that privileged position. It is noteworthy that it is in a shopping mall built on the tree where Sarah Fiers was hanged, the final confrontation of the characters (figure 5): the symbol of consumerist economic power, whose generic architecture preyed on leisure areas (such as the 1978 camp) and historic and ancestral sites (such as the Union settlement in 1666).
Figure 5: Deena’s group prepares for the final showdown at the mall. In the background, on the right, you can see the tree where Sarah Fiers was hanged. That location was once the colony of Union, which originated Shadyside, and a holiday camp. Source: Fear Street 1666 frame.
In 1994 we also finally have the conclusion of Deena’s maturation arc – an inherent part of the syntax of suburban fantastic. However, different from what is expected in the subgenre (where we are just witnesses of this process), this maturation is done in a shared way with the spectator: it happens when we join Deena to see the world through the eyes of Sarah Fiers – in a joint exercise in empathy. The growth comes precisely from learning the story about your ancestors – other women.
In such a way, the trilogy subverts the syntax of one of the greatest classics of fantastic suburbanism: Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). If in the 80s trilogy it is necessary to go to the past to change the present, here, it is necessary to go to the past to understand the present – and, from there, to be able to change the future. A claim for a hegemonic narrative that for centuries has inferred (and still infers) violence to peripheral bodies – just as Silvia Frederici (2017) does by also resignifying the mythological figure of the witch.
The final revelation of placing a police authority as the villain is certainly not new, but it is representative that in a film starring a black and lesbian character, it is a straight upper-middle-class cis man who is the great antagonist. Even more so if it is defeated by a group formed entirely by women and/or black people – peripheral bodies historically associated with witchcraft and/or “Satanist practices”. The massacre and persecution of these bodies destroyed a “universe of practices, beliefs and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the discipline of capitalist work” (FREDERICI, 2017, p.294) – and which are now beginning to gain a voice within the hegemonic media.
Considerations
The Fear Street trilogy represents (in varying degrees) a step in the process of historical reclaiming the narratives. By placing black women as protagonists of historically androcentric and/or white subgenres, such as suburban fantastic and American Gothic, a historical demand of these bodies to occupy prominent roles in these narratives is met. In the words of the director herself, Leigh Janiak, the films “were an opportunity to tell a story where a queer romance drove the events of the narrative” and that the very base material, the stories of R.L. Stine “were very white and very straight” [6].
These changes, of course, are also present behind the scenes of her own production – we know how rare the presence of women directing high-budget films is still, and even more, directing three films at once. It is important to note also Netflix’s practically unprecedented marketing strategy. The Fear Street trilogy certainly occupies a hybrid place between film and series, and, despite having a narrative cohesion in each of the works, it is clearly produced with the intention of being watched together. The fact that each movie is released a week apart, refers to the series’ classic exhibition model (and that Netflix itself transformed, by starting to release seasons all at once).
We also saw, throughout this article, how Leigh Janiak takes advantage of this structure made possible by Netflix, to play with subgenres and the spectator’s expectations. In the same way that her film structure allows her to work in a well-delineated way with each subgenre, her unique narrative makes the subgenres lend their semantic and syntactic elements to each other. Her work even contributes to the study of syntactic and semantic links between subgenres. I would like to take the opportunity to highlight how each film lends to each other syntactic elements: suburban fantastic’s “restoration of the status quo”, slasher’s “restoration of heteronormativity” and, American Gothic’s “condemnation of utopia”.
In this sense, in general, there is an intention of innovation by Netflix. Within a production model currently criticized for being ruled by algorithms, it is undoubtedly revitalizing to see subversions, whether in the form of production, in the casting of the cast and crew, or the semantic and syntactic elements of their films and series. This innovation, of course, is part of a broader Horror film conjuncture. Contemporary films directed by black, Latino, and LGBTQIA+ directors such as The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015), The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016), Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017), Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018), Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) and Vampires vs. The Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020) all bring contributions and semantic, syntactic and narrative innovations to the genre, and should be further analyzed.
Finally, it is essential to underline the importance of these peripheral perspectives entering Horror and the different subgenres that branch off, after all, it is the genre most passionate about the body (PINEDO, 1997). We saw how American Gothic (MORGAN, 2002), the slasher (CLOVER, 2015) and suburban fantastic (McFADZEAN, 2019) had moralizing roots in their genesis – serving both as cautionary tales and coming-of-age fables that reinforced a hegemonic perspective. The defamation of the nature of peripheral bodies and their practices is an inherent practice of capitalism (FEDERICI, 2017, p.37) and that was (and still is) perpetuated by Horror cinema.
The Fear Street trilogy comes at a conjuncture in which the “Other” claims the hegemonic media (in this case, the high budget cinema) to tell what terrifies him. And, through their eyes, we can see that these horrors are much more real than the classics of the Horror genre. They are less about witches and masked serial killers, and more about authorities and the patriarchal white middle class.
[1] https://deadline.com/2020/08/rl-stine-fear-street-movie-trilogy-netflix-chernin-entertainment-leigh-janiak-director-the-summer-of-fear-2021-1203010276/ Acessed in 02/08/2021
[2] The use of the term (sub)genres is used to incorporate both genres and subgenres.
[3] Collective of Children Protagonists, typical of fantastic suburbanism, as pointed out by Ashley Carranza(in WETMORE, 2018).
[4] https://www.omelete.com.br/terror/rua-do-medo-stranger-things-panico Acessed in 30/07/2021
[5] https://thepatterning.com/2017/02/13/the-nostalgia-pendulum-a-rolling-30-year-cycle-of-pop-culture-trends/ Acessed in 29/07/2021
[6] https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/fear-street-director-leigh-janiak-discusses-why-netflix-trilogy-is-propelled-by-a-queer-romance-9820751.html Acessed in 01/08/2021
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