I Was A Teenage Paperback - Fear Street Part One: 1994 Will Steal Your Nostalgic Heart Right Out Of Your Chest

As a teenager, I would spend my summer afternoons lying out on the trampoline in Soffe shorts and tank tops, soaking up the sun and the most recent Fear Street I snagged off my mother’s bookshelf. I would become completely immersed in every single word R.L. Stine wrote. Each new page presented a new witch, ghoul, or unrealistic teen situation, and I was insatiable. It was my form of escaping from a town with a church on every corner and the ingenuity of a Candace Cameron Bure Hallmark movie. Needless to say, I went into the first installment of the Fear Street trilogy with the highest of expectations, and I can honestly say I don’t have a bone to pick with it... outside of the ones belonging to the skeletons in Shadyside’s closet. 

Fear Street Part One: 1994 introduces us to the world of Shadyside with a beginning scene that watches like a love letter to the opening of Scream and a soundtrack identical to a playlist I would have made based out of my older sister’s CD collection. This should come as no surprise if you grew up worshipping in the house of Stine, but Shadyside is a small town dripping with lore and, you guessed it, blood. The inaugural entry in the trilogy introduces us to the legend of Sarah Fier, an alleged witch, who was hanged and thus cursed the town of Shadyside for their transgressions. Naturally, we not only have to worry about Sarah Fier but all of the killer friends she’s made (literally) throughout the past few decades, as they try to kill the unlucky teen who accidentally disrupted Sarah’s makeshift grave. 

This adaptation could have easily turned into a generic teen slasher, but 1994 delivers in a way even I couldn’t have predicted. First and foremost, we have LGBTQIA+ representation that doesn’t feel forced but rather feels like a storyline on a 90s teen drama a la My So-Called Life. Secondly, no one is safe. Remember that. Thirdly, I’m not going to spoil any of the kills within 1994, but boy howdy, they make the slasher genre seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread (this idiom placement will make a lot more sense after you watch the movie). To recap, if you love lesbian storylines, secondhand character anxiety, and insides on the outside, you’re going to love 1994. 

This movie made me yearn for those days when I laid out to try to get a tan and, more importantly, swept up in the latest YA horror created by the delightfully grotesque mind of R.L. Stine. I could see the accompanying text in one of my slightly tattered, garage sale paperbacks, and I could feel the Texas sun growing hotter on my skin with every scene. It was seeing my adolescent horror indulgence come to life. To me, it’s like someone threw a Fear Street paperback in with a Kevin Williamson screenplay, but the meta came out in the wash. I would highly recommend it if you enjoyed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (that scarecrow scene still royally messes me up to this day). Seeing how well these two adaptations were executed, it makes me extremely hopeful for this new wave of emerging YA adaptation horror (I honestly can’t decide if I want more or less scarecrow body horror because it bothered ME, a supreme queen of gore). 

I am genuinely excited to see where this trilogy goes in its next two installments,1978 and 1666, and if you haven’t guessed, I will definitely be writing about both as well. Admittedly, I was the most excited for this time period as the 90s will always have a very soft spot in my heart for many reasons, but the 90s aren’t used as a crutch. This is a horror movie that happens to occur in the 90s instead of a 90s movie that happens to also be a slasher. In short, whether you grew up reading the inspiration behind this trilogy, or you just enjoy a good homage to the slicing and dicing of 20th century horror cinema, Fear Street Part One: 1994 comes complete with all the splatter, bone crunching, and good ol’ 90s slasher squelching you can stomach... unless you get disemboweled along the way.