Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Director: Leigh Janiak
Quick Impressions:
We almost watched this movie on Friday night. The thing is, our dear friends, the godparents of both our younger children, cleverly lured us to their lake house on Saturday morning. (I put it that way because when I replied with vague uncertainty to the initial invitation, my friend said, “Great, we can tentatively plan on it. Let me know if anything changes.” And so we were going, you see. I was nervous because we were taking their boat to a restaurant called The Lighthouse. “Are we sure eating in a restaurant is safe?” I asked my husband. Apparently, I only feel safe flying to Los Angeles and competing in Jeopardy! tournaments.)
What does that have to do with Fear Street Part Two: 1978? Two things. 1) We had to be there early in the morning (because a reasonable person would assume that if I was awake at 5 am, I would also be awake at 7:00). So we didn’t want to stay up too late watching a horror movie. 2) If a scary movie takes place at a summer camp in 1978, wouldn’t you expect a lake to be involved? Friday the 13th came out in 1980, and a lake is a pretty integral feature of that summer camp. Isn’t it better to watch a bunch of people being murdered at a lake the evening after you spend the day in a lake rather than the evening before?
Despite my initial qualms, we did have a great time with our friends. Once I got out in the sun, I transitioned from, “Are you sure a restaurant is safe?” to, “Of course, I should jump into this lake even though I forgot a bathing suit, and when can I try the water skis?” alarmingly quickly. And on the way home, our exhausted six-year-old fell asleep in the car, which meant we could watch Fear Street the moment we walked in the door.
We were all geared up for terror on a lake at a summer camp. To our surprise, however, Camp Nightwing, featured in this installment of Fear Street, barely even has a lake. (I mean, it’s there, but the campers almost never are.) Instead, at this camp, they get their kicks by setting people on fire, getting high on over-the-counter painkillers, and going through with morale building T-shirt related events, even if there is an axe murderer on the loose at the time.
The Good:
I’ll tell you what’s not good—Camp Nightwing. Unless you know the backstory, it’s pretty hard to figure out what parent in their right mind would agree to send their kids there. In our first look at the place, we see that one camper, Ziggy Berman (Sadie Sink, better known to my daughter as Max from Stranger Things) doesn’t get along with the others. They don’t like her. She’s apparently pulled a number of stunts like vandalizing the outhouse with graffiti. So a bunch of other campers gang up on her, chase her into the woods, call her a witch, and set her on fire. You know, like you do.
Then a camp counselor appears and points out that both Ziggy and those against her are in the wrong here. (They have literally burnt the flesh of her arm with a cigarette lighter at this point.) The one person in camp favorably disposed to Ziggy intervenes. (That’s Nick Goode who, as the characters like to remind us every fifteen seconds, will be the future sheriff. The character is played by Ashley Zukerman in 1994, and by Ted Sutherland in most of this movie.) Nick likes Ziggy, so he points out that if they kick her out of camp for her misdeeds, her parents may come back with ugly questions about her arm. If you’re not from Shadyside, if you’re just a member of the audience, this is a very bizarre scenario. Why would Ziggy even want to stay at a camp where her peers try to burn her alive? Why wouldn’t her parents be angry about that no matter what?
The movie has an answer for that. Ziggy has no parents. (Well, she has parents, but because they’re dealing with their own issues, they chronically neglect her.) The only responsible person in Ziggy’s life is her fairly hostile sister Cindy. (For some reason, Cindy won’t be able to go to college if Ziggy gets kicked out of summer camp. I didn’t entirely follow her logic on that one, but I’ll take her word for it. She sounded very earnest.) (I do see her point. Cindy is a camp counselor. She needs to get paid for her work. I just feel like the problem seems contrived.)
At first, as I watched, this was all quite hard for me to accept. I kept thinking, “What is this ‘get kicked out of camp’ business? She should immediately be withdrawn from that camp. Why does she stay there?” I get that things are not great at home, but these people just set her on fire! They burned her flesh. It’s almost like the summer camp and both towns feeding it (Shadyside and Sunnyvale) have been under the curse of an evil witch named Sarah Fier since 1666 or something!
So the movie does a good job of showing us that something horrible is happening to the people at this camp. The danger they’re in is so dire, inescapable, and fated that they don’t even realize they are in danger. Often in any kind of cozy mystery, particularly in slasher stories where a murderer is on the loose and danger is coming, you watch and think, “Why don’t they just leave?” These people can’t leave. They are not just ordinary teens at camp. They are fated participants in recurring, ritual murder with a supernatural cause.
The movie dials up the awfulness and danger of an average day at camp to such a degree that the audience can’t help but think, “Wait a minute. These things are objectively awful. These people should be reacting differently.” But they can’t see the danger like we can. They’re cursed. At Camp Nightwing, the scariest thing is the dramatic irony. We know something is wrong. The characters are like, “Well, she said to hold Ziggy down while she set her on fire, so I guess we should. After all, Ziggy’s played her fair share of pranks on us! Now let’s burn her alive. That’s totally normal teen hijinks!”
It does not speak well of the people at this camp that to me, the most realistic and sympathetic character by far is the nurse. (Maybe sympathetic is the wrong word. But she piqued my curiosity, at the very least.) I mean, yes, she’s quite unhinged, and yes, her daughter did murder seven or eight people (depending on whose count you go by), and yes, she does…
Well, I won’t tell you what she does. That’s too big a spoiler. But surely you’ll agree that this camp does not sound like the world’s most nurturing environment. It must distribute misleading brochures to parents. Surely they wouldn’t approve of what’s actually going on. Some campers incessantly scrub latrines and floors. Others delight in conspicuous sexual encounters. In fact, that’s mostly what they do. Lots of scrubbing, lots of sex, occasional Parent Trap-meets-Carrie revenge plotting, intermittent drug use. I guess those are the things that keep you busy at camp when the lake’s not for you.
And then, of course, there’s my favorite thing in the entire movie, the big T-shirt event. This cracks me up so much. Everything going on around this place is so R rated, and then suddenly one plot thread seems to have been lifted from the Jessie spin-off Bunk’d on the Disney Channel. The people running this event are so invested in it. Every ten seconds, they remind everyone not to forget to wear their blue or red T-shirt. (The colors represent Shadyside and Sunnyvale).
“One thing’s for sure,” I said to my family as we watched, “this T-shirt contest thing is happening. They’re like, ‘I don’t care how many people are stabbed, burned, or otherwise murdered tonight, I have been planning this T-shirt event for two weeks…’”
I mean, watching, you know it’s going to happen, and you know when it does, everybody participating is going to be grotesquely slaughtered somehow. I don’t know why I find that quite as funny as I do. Maybe it’s because by all appearances, this is the only positive activity anyone is doing at camp. And how positive is it, actually? They’re trying to boost morale and stress teamwork by dividing the campers into the two groups that have a centuries-long history of bitter rivalry and economic disparity. Who thought that would be fun? (“I know you all think that campers from Shadyside can’t get along with campers from Sunnyvale, but tonight we’re going to tackle that rift head on by reinforcing it!” They act like the T-shirts will make all the difference because T-shirts make everything fun.) You just know that somebody there is going to make such an effort to sell the T-shirt activity that they’re going to be horribly murdered because of it, and then that happens!
Fear Street: 1978 also uses songs a bit more sparingly than its first installment. My dad really enjoyed the soundtrack. (Possibly that was all he enjoyed, but it’s hard not to like the hits of your own era.) The cast is good, too, particularly Sadie Sink (Ziggy), Emily Rudd (her sister Cindy), Ryan Simpkins (Alice), and Ted Sutherland (who’s going to be the sheriff some day). I kept accidentally mixing up a lot of the other campers, but that’s probably mostly because I was tired while watching. I wouldn’t blame the actors for that. I also found the character of Nurse Lane (Jordana Spiro) more captivating than I had expected. (And in case any audience members weren’t asking themselves, “Why would anyone voluntarily remain at this camp?” her character really drives the point home.)
Going into this movie, I was curious about how the story of the characters from 1994 would be advanced when we jumped to 1978. But the movie just does the simplest thing and keeps everyone from the first film around, using 1994 as a frame story, a jumping back point. Initially, I thought this was a less exciting way of doing it than I had hoped. (Perhaps you’re wondering, “What did you want them to do?” Well, I didn’t know! That’s why I was so eager to find out!) Then, just like last time, at the very, very end of the movie, I suddenly thought, “Well I didn’t expect this to happen! This looks so intriguing!” Watching this movie, I kept feeling like, “Yes, but I’m not as invested…something’s missing.” It appears the third film will correct that. Just when I’m at a low ebb, thinking, “These movies are okay, but not that good,” the movie always seems to reach out and grab me, yanking me closer like, “Well how about this?”
I fully expect the third film to be the best one, the most satisfying in terms of effective horror, character development, and story resolution.
Best Action Sequence:
I’m quite fond of two moments. First of all, I love the scene with Nurse Lane. I do find her really scary, unlike most other things in the movie. I think it’s because she actually seems scared, genuinely disturbed. Plus she’s about to become an agent of evil because she’s desperate to do good, to thwart evil. Most of the time when stuff that should be disturbing happens to people in these Fear Street movies, I just don’t believe it’s really happening to them, or that I need to be worried about it. I do believe that Nurse Lane is tormented about what happened to her daughter, and I find it deeply intriguing that (after years of careful research) she fully believes that the best solution is the one she attempts to execute. I feel like there are stakes with Nurse Lane. Everybody else is always like, “Oh no, I’m being possessed, I’m being chased, I’m currently dead,” and I just think dismissively, “Don’t worry. They’ll fix it in a minute.” And the movie adds, “Now here’s another song.”
But I believe Nurse Lane is disturbed, disturbing, and in distress. I also find everyone else’s lack of reaction to her behavior deeply unnerving. It’s the scariest aspect of the film. (Why are they staying at this camp????) And I mean, that is supposed to be the scariest part. These towns are cursed; the residents are incapable of noticing the true nature of the horrors that keep happening to them. Despite being somewhat out of her mind, Nurse Lane is one of the only people who does get it. So the movie is quite effective here. I think this character should be both the most disturbed and the most disturbing (to the audience), and she is. And I think the other characters’ inability to become appropriately disturbed by her should also unnerve the audience (and it does).
Also, if there’s any doubt about who’s who in the story the characters from 1994 are listening to, this encounter with Nurse Lane should dispel that immediately. Only two people react appropriately, as if they know they need to pay attention to Nurse Lane, one character in the story, and the person telling the story. That should immediately dispel any confusion for the audience.
The other scene I love (predictably, given my obsession with the T-shirt event) is the payoff of the T-shirt event, specifically when one person tries desperately to convince some others that they’re having fun. My husband said, “Oh I like this guy. I can relate to him.” I was like, “Well, don’t get too attached to him.”
Because this movie series seems to be a meta reflection on earlier horror movies, we get lots of intentionally predictable story beats that are very fun to anticipate and see come to fruition.
Best Scene Visually:
Though my daughter really liked Ziggy and her storyline, at one point, she did groan, “Can we stop this Romeo and Juliet nonsense?” (In fairness, though, the bad blood between the two towns is the backbone of the trilogy.) (Imagine having blood as your backbone. No wonder the scenes about the witch are so gory!)
But in the scene my daughter called out, Ziggy and Future Sheriff Nick Goode are Romeo and Julieting together while everyone else is either lost in a Satanic horror tunnel or participating in the T-shirt thing. Ziggy and Nick aren’t wearing the event-related T-shirts (red for Sunnyvale, blue for Shadyside.) They like each other and are eagerly looking for commonalities, although Nick is from Sunnyvale, and Ziggy is from Shadyside. But even though they’re not wearing the bright, bold official T-shirts, Nick’s shirt does feature muted red accents, Ziggy’s shirt, dull blue ones.
Best Scene:
I suddenly got far, far more invested in the film when my husband made a prediction, and I realized, “Wait a minute, is this about to turn into The Goonies?” I know that’s not a horror movie, but I can’t help that. There are some similarities for sure (and even more potential similarities).
So my favorite scene is probably when the two major plot threads come back together as sisters Ziggy and Cindy reunite.
(My husband didn’t care for some of their unwise choices here, though. He kept saying, “Leave!” And when one character says, “You did it,” and another amends, “We did it,” my daughter got really exasperated and balked, “We did it?? She wasn’t there! You weren’t there!”)
The Negatives:
For me, this movie is more to fun to describe than to watch. 1978’s biggest shortcoming is not that it’s bad, but that when you consider its plot elements, characters, and especially its visually rich settings, it should be better. (When I abbreviate the title that way, it sounds like I’m critiquing the actual calendar year 1978. And when I consider the stories my mom told me about life as a poor newlywed during the Carter years, maybe that’s true. Maybe 1978 is just more fun to describe than to experience, and the movie is providing some clever meta-commentary on the period. Or maybe I just think it’s funny to say that.)
At one point, I realized that someone in another room listening to my daughter and me banter back and forth about the movie might get the impression it was better than it was and enjoy our viewing experience more than we were!
She noted, “I find this storyline not very engaging.” I replied, “I agree. Right now R-rated Parent Trap is more engaging than Satanic murder tunnel.”
The storyline my daughter didn’t find engaging really should be. First a girl named Alice descends into a mysterious tunnel that leads her into a surreal world of bizarre horrors. She’s high on L484 at the time, which probably does help a bit later. She probably should have taken more of it, and maybe some I 7, too.) One person with her, Cindy, is the worst kind of enemy, someone who used to be her friend. This relationship dynamic should be more compelling to watch than it is. On paper, it’s compelling. But my daughter is right. Neither of us was into it. I honestly can’t figure out why. I have no real complaints about either actress, and their characters seem broadly realistic, like people you could encounter (and, in fact, have encountered) in real life. But something is not quite working.
I, personally, vacillated wildly. First I would think, “I should like this. I want to like it.” But I wouldn’t like it. Then I’d decide, “Okay, I don’t like it. This must be a weak part of the movie.” But as I tried to watch thinking I disliked it, I would suddenly start to like it…but never quite enough. My daughter was amused, but I found the entire thing quite frustrating. Finally, I said to her, “I want Cindy to kill Alice. Then it will be interesting.”
Note, my desire to see Cindy kill Alice had nothing to do with a dislike for Alice. It’s not like when you get emotionally invested in characters and root for or against them. As someone who writes myself, I just felt the characters were a little stale and predictable when they had so much potential (so much potential! And they both have names from the Brady Bunch, too. There’s a lot of attention to naming in this series. I do like that).
The thing is, the place where Cindy and Alice (and others) go is so creepy. Judging by the way the scenes down there look, the story should be ten thousand times more effective at terrifying us and making us get emotionally invested in the plot.
Now maybe part of the problem is us. We did spend about six hours in a lake yesterday. We were pretty exhausted (and still vaguely disappointed that Camp Nightwing didn’t feature a lake). But the thing is, when we cut away from Cindy and Alice in the evil underground lair, and Ziggy is above ground planning a stunt inspired by Carrie that plays out somewhat more like a prank from The Parent Trap, I suddenly got interested in the scene. I didn’t stop and think, “Why is this good? Am I sure it’s good? What could be better?” I just liked watching it.
It seems weird that characters could be working through years of pain and mutual conflict (desired by neither party) in an underground Satanic murder tunnel full of genuine peril and very cool set decorations, and then the movie cuts to somebody getting locked in the bathroom as a prank, and suddenly you’re like, “Ooh! It just got interesting!”
Ziggy’s storyline was consistently better at holding our attention. Maybe part of it is that my daughter already really likes Sadie Sink from Stranger Things. (Honestly, I was more interested even in the fallout of the T-shirt event than in what was going on down in the evil lair. But, in fairness, they really did talk up that T-shirt event. Or maybe part of it is that I never could get into Bunk’d and always think, “You know what would improve this show? An axe murderer!”)
Now I like what’s done with Ziggy. As I’ve mentioned, she’s played by an actress from Stranger Things, and early on she prominently flips someone off, but she and Maya Hawke seem to be on radically different trajectories in this series. That’s cool.
But one thing I did wonder—is this movie supposed to have a plot twist? If so, it’s not much of a twist. If it’s supposed to make us gasp and take us by surprise, then it fails because I called it almost immediately. If, however, we’re supposed to experience it as I did and never be completely one-hundred percent sure the entire time, then it’s working pretty well. (Still, I was like 90 percent sure, so if you’re supposed to be one-hundred percent sure in the other direction, then it’s a major failing of the film. I’m not sure what we’re intended to think. I kept wondering, “Is this meant as a twist, or was I just not paying enough attention at the beginning because I’m exhausted from being in a lake all day?”)
My husband says the problem is that we watch movies assuming there’s a twist. In 2021, who doesn’t? I do have questions related to the fact that we’re being told a story. Are we seeing exactly the same story the 1994 teens are being told, or are we (the audience) getting an augmented, God’s eye version?
For some reason, I could never decide if I liked this film more or less than 1994. Well, I liked it less. But for a while, I was convinced it was objectively better. Then I decided, “No, it’s much worse.” It does have more elements of genuine horror, and it privileges those over the humor. But those elements of horror would have worked better for me (i.e. been actually scary) if I had been more invested in the characters. Overall, I liked the characters better in 1994 (I think mainly because they all kept clamoring for our attention. You watch and think, “You’re all being a bit too weird,” but still, you can’t help watching them.) That valedictorian drug dealer–I could never decide if I liked her as a person, but I did grow to (really, really) like her as a character, and then what happens to her is so extremely memorable. This movie didn’t give me anybody like that. And it certainly doesn’t give us anybody like Fred Hechinger’s Simon.
Fear Street 1994 is clearly modeled on 90s horror films (specifically Scream), whereas this one is obviously aiming for more of a Friday the 13th/various Stephen King stories/weirdly also The Goonies vibe. I think perhaps this one succeeds more at what it’s trying to be, but I enjoyed watching the first installment more (even though it may be less successful at seeming like a 90s movie). Because it relies less on over-the-top humor, Fear Street 1978 should easily be the superior film, except that the horror it leans into for some reason doesn’t feel that urgent or scary most of the time.
Maybe the issue is that despite the R-rated content, these movies are aimed at a pretty young audience, and they’re just not trying to be as genuinely disturbing as I would like them to be. I’m not entirely kidding when I keep bringing up Bunk’d and The Parent Trap. Even though the plot elements make us think of Friday the 13th, this movie has a surprising Disney vibe. It could be on the Disney Channel except for all the sex, drugs, gore, evil, and profanity.
Of course, when I read my husband a draft of this review, he put in, “Yes, but you never find horror movies scary. The only horror movie I can ever remember you saying you found scary when it ended was Zodiac.” (Um, yes! They never caught the Zodiac killer! And what if he had murdered one of us at random before our wedding day?)
“That’s not true,” I replied. “I found Inception very scary. I was scared for like two weeks.”
He insisted, “That is not a horror movie. You are never scared by horror.”
“Well,” I replied, “you weren’t with me when I was five when I asked my mom, ‘What are they doing to poor Gizmo?’ and the whole movie theater heard me and burst out laughing.”
“That is not the same,” he objected. “You weren’t scared.”
“I was scared for Gizmo,” I said. “They were throwing darts at him!”
“When I saw Gremlins,” he replied, “I could not stop thinking about it!”
“Neither could I!” I pleaded.
He went on, “I was scared every night because I was afraid they were hiding under my bed, and they were going to get me.”
“Oh you’re right,” I realized. “I just wanted Gizmo to live at my house and ride around in his little car.”
He has a point. But I’m sure I have been scared by some horror movies. Fatal Attraction scared me when I was nine. (I didn’t realize it scared me, but for weeks after I watched, I kept having nightmares that another woman made herself look exactly like my mother in an effort to kidnap my little sister.) I’m scared all the time. Something must be scaring me! When I was little, the Chamberlain in The Dark Crystal used to scare me. (Of course, this did not stop me from watching the movie every day.)
“The Dark Crystal is not a horror movie,” my husband protests. “It’s a children’s movie. That doesn’t count.”
“But Gremlins counts?” I shot back.
He concedes that children’s movies can be scary, so I’ll agree that I’m not often scared by horror. Still, you don’t have to be watching horror to be scared for a character and emotionally invested in the story. (For example, I remember being terrified for Octavia Spencer when I watched The Shape of Water. I’m not worried about these characters in the same way. Honestly, the one I’ve been most concerned about in this series is Maya Hawke!)
At any rate, I didn’t like watching 1978 as much as the first installment, but I have liked writing about it much more. I don’t know how to account for that. It’s very strange. Thinking back over Fear Street 1978 has been ten thousand times more satisfying to me than watching either it or Fear Street 1994.
Overall:
I can’t blame Fear Street Part 2: 1978 for not making use of a lake. (In fact, I hate it when people get upset with a book or movie for not doing something that they themselves whimsically desire.) But I don’t think it’s as funny as the first installment of the trilogy. Also, despite containing much more horror, it’s really not as scary as it could be. But we had fun watching it, lots of fun, and once again I find myself surprisingly excited to see the next installment. If you like one of these movies, you’re going to like all three, and I continue to be intrigued by the method of telling this story.