Fear Street (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

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bainbridgezu
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2011 10:54 pm

Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#2 Post by bainbridgezu » Thu Jan 24, 2019 5:29 pm

Alex Ross Perry is joining Leigh Janiak (Honeymoon) and directing the second of three simultaneously-released films based on R.L. Stine's Fear Street books
Very into this choice, with Perry's installment involving class conflict interrupted by strange events at a summer camp in the late seventies. Wonder who they'll get to direct the closing film, a witchcraft story alternating between 1666 and 1994?

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domino harvey
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Re: New Films in Production, v.2

#3 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jan 24, 2019 5:35 pm

Perry is such a great choice to direct a movie about teens, I don't know why it never occurred to me until now

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#4 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Sep 20, 2021 3:02 pm

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

Ok. So there’s a movie based on R.L. Stine, that takes place in the 90s, and is a slasher film? Where the fuck is Domino Harvey? Why am I not hearing about this from him? Not enough Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place references? What's going on?

This next part is technically a spoiler, but it’s a reference more than a plot point; and let’s be fair, you guys aren’t going to watch this anyway: they pull a Scream by offing Maya Hawke in the opening scene. That’s puzzling, because she’s a charismatic, engaging actor, while everyone else in the movie, lead especially, is a bland, pretty nobody.

I read tons of Goosebumps as a kid, but never Fear Street. I was conscious of the series as a more adult Goosebumps, but was otherwise unfamiliar with it except as series of scary covers at the library. The basic jist I gather from the movie and Wikipedia is that the series takes place in a cursed town called Shadyside, which has a sister city called Summerville. The film uses this dichotomy politically, having the Sunnyville people be all rich, white, and preppy, while the Shadysiders are mainly queer, of colour, and of low socio-economic status. Don’t expect anything to come of this. You will on the other hand experience a lot of 90s rock music you haven’t heard in forever, like Nine Inch Nails, Rob Zombie, Garbage, Prodigy, and even Bush (who I’d forgotten existed).

There is one point of interest in the movie if you’re at all interested in horror: the movie is a slasher without sharing or being of the classical slasher ethos. And this is despite quoting slasher tropes, occasionally referencing Scream, and being suffused with leftist values. At no point does one get the sense of genre subversion. I think what’s happening is that how media thinks about and represents young people has just changed. At the same time, slasher tropes have been losing their inescapability. So where Scream still felt it had to engage directly with the tropes, using irony and knowingness to distinguish itself, it doesn’t even occur to Fear Street part 1 to use them. Sex not only isn’t punishable, it’s not even notable; it’s just a natural aspect of teen relationships, queer or otherwise. There is no final girl as we would recognize it, not for any pointed reason, but because relationships and group dynamics predominate (identity politics aren’t really compatible with final girl tropes, much as punishing sex becomes doubly fraught when the couplings are mainly queer and racially mixed). Characters are rarely peeled off from the group and stalked one by one, and they don’t trip, run into blind alley, or anything else; in general they work together, protect each other’s vulnerability, and are smart and resourceful. And, again, not pointedly, but as a matter of course, because by and large people are valuable. The film is very of the moment, but in a different way than, say, the recent Halloween movie. Halloween 2018 had a strong feminist angle, but its feminism was a pointed critique of slasher tropes, a layer of ideas consciously applied to a tradition the film still felt to be powerful. The great conflagration at the end was a symbolic burning of the tradition the original helped to make such a cultural mainstay. By needing to fight it with fire, the movie was admitting the tradition was still a powerful cultural force. But then David Gordon Green and co. had their sensibilities formed by the media of the previous generation. The makers of Fear Street Part 1 feel no need to attack old genre tropes because the tropes just don’t seem important. The slasher film as a subgenre exists in this movie less as a series of tropes than as iconography. One recognizes the imagery and maybe some of the underlying structure, but mainly what one notices is a very modern set of young people and politics. And not even in a pandering way—or at least such pandering has become so de rigueur that it’s ceased to seem like pandering and become its own set of tropes. I mean, this is not a good movie. But it does feel kind of important. A register of cultural change, maybe. Slasher tropes are no longer compatible with how popular media understands youth and politics, and so are drifting away. Rather than apply this change in the form of media critique, Fear Street Part 1 just ignores the tropes and saves its critique for direct political and social comment. It finds different things important.

There’s a second Fear Street, set at camp in the 70s, so we’ll see if the above survives being in even greater proximity to the tropes’ origins or if it reverts to the usual. The next movies will be a good test case for how slasher films will fair in modern, leftist youth culture.

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#5 Post by knives » Mon Sep 20, 2021 3:04 pm

I really liked the books as a kid, but I’ll keep to the surprisingly good Scary Stories film to scratch that particular nostalgic itch.

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Mr Sausage
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The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#6 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Sep 20, 2021 8:30 pm

Fear Street Part 2: 1978 (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

Hey, Gillian Jacobs is in this one. But she’s only in the frame story, so… Oh, there’s a Stranger Things alum here, too, but she’s the main character this time. Unlike everyone in the first film, Sadie Sink is an engaging actress, but her character is such a grating, aggressive asshole that you have to grit your teeth whenever she interacts with anyone. The movie leans more into genre tropes in the beginning, with the lead’s camp-counselor sister being the prim, goody-two-shoes virgin who clashes with the punky, pot-smoking, sex-having counselors. But it’s hard to tell if it’s because the film is using genre tropes, or if it genuinely thinks the 70s was like that. The film’s actual themes run a little darker, with alcoholism, neglect, and family trauma defining the relationship between Sink’s character, Ziggy, and her sister, as well as Ziggy’s’s larger social rejection from her peers. It’s also heavily implied that Ziggy’s sister, Cindy, is only so prim and straight edge as a defense mechanism, coping with family disasters through an exaggerated adherence to social rules.

This film, too, has no interest in the slasher ethos, either genuinely or as parody. It sees social roles not in terms of ethics, but mental health and socio-economic status. So while the druggies die, it lacks any conservative ethical component, not least because it’s one of the upright preppies who’s the murderer (not a spoiler, trust me). A girl is killed soon after sex, yes, but typically safe characters like several young campers and the preppy older sister (again, not a spoiler) are killed as well. Once again, the characters are resourceful and competent; they relay information properly, quickly establish and carry out plans, and tend to work in pairs or groups to overcome things. And the big, emotionally charged culminating kill is not of the killer, but of a main character. The ending is melancholy rather than triumphant. Again, it’s the iconography rather than the substructure that the movie takes up, with the camp, the woods, and a bag-headed, axe-wielding killer announcing the lineage. The rest takes its cues from thoughtful modern drama and is quite humanist.

It’s a better movie than its predecessor. That the actors are better and the drama more engaging really ups the watchability. The biggest problem is that it’s not a good slasher. It takes about an hour for the killer to show up, and once he does, more screen time is dedicated to characters exploring their emotional baggage and to developing the Fear Street mythos than to the killer’s rampage.

There’s a high level of gore here, but a minimum of stalk and suspense. Funny to think that what was once the show-stopping set-piece kill of Friday the 13th is here just a tossed-off kill of a minor character. So one would expect, right, violence gets worse as time goes on? But the Friday films by and large got less violent as the series moved into the Regan era, culminating in a basically bloodless part 8. The first movie remains one of the most violent entries in the series, indeed one of the most violent of American slashers, even in its R-rated cut; and yet Netflix nostalgia farms and superhero movies like Deadpool and The Suicide Squad outpace it in a tossed off, almost casual manner. We’re in an increasingly censorious age, yet movie violence doesn’t seem to be on its radar.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#7 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Sep 21, 2021 1:55 pm

Fear Street Part 3: 1666 (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

No slashers here, but witches and puritans and cod-Irish accents. The plot is meant to explain and resolve the Fear Street mythology, exploring how Sarah Fier (get it?) became a witch and cursed the town. At least for the first half. The second half jumps back to 1994 to resolve its cliff hanger. The film becomes an explicit allegory for how the rich, white, and powerful feed off the blood and misery of the underclasses. It’s trite, but at least it’s not the puritans. I don’t think I could’ve taken much more of that. Plus I chuckled at a vicious car crash set to Oasis.

Easily the worst of the three. The first half is almost unwatchable, the second half just a retread of the first one.

Nw_jahrles
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#8 Post by Nw_jahrles » Wed Sep 22, 2021 10:26 am

I watched the trilogy recently as well and agree the third entry is the weakest. Simply a case of asking too much of the cast to try those accents, and I imagine there wasn’t much prep time for the director since they had to make two other movies.

I felt the first one was the best of the bunch because the premise gave a fresh twist to the slasher formula. The 90’s soundtrack was way overdone and it seemed clear Leigh Janiak wanted to fit all her favourite 90’s songs into the movie.

Part 2 felt very standard camp slasher fare except wasn’t as good as the best films of this type. Personally, for me, CGI blood and gore isn’t nearly as visceral or fun as practical effects. I always find CGI slasher Murders come across a bit cold to me.

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swo17
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Re: Fear Street (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

#9 Post by swo17 » Sat Oct 02, 2021 4:44 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Mon Sep 20, 2021 3:02 pm
Ok. So there’s a movie based on R.L. Stine, that takes place in the 90s, and is a slasher film? Where the fuck is Domino Harvey? Why am I not hearing about this from him? Not enough Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place references? What's going on?
I don't know what you're talking about, domino started this thread four years ago

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Fear Street (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

#10 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Oct 03, 2021 7:52 am

Then I did hear about it from him after all and just forgot. All is right in the world again.

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