Produced by Chernin Entertainment, a film adaptation of Fear Street began development at 20th Century Fox in 2015, with Janiak hired in 2017. Filming for the trilogy took place back-to-back from March to September 2019 in Georgia, with the intention of a theatrical release beginning June 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney, Chernin Entertainment ended their distribution deal with 20th Century Studios and sold rights to Netflix in August 2020.
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 premiered at the Los Angeles State Historic Park on July 8, 2021, and was released by Netflix on July 9, 2021. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the screenplay, direction and the performances of Sink, Rudd, and Simpkins. The final installment in the trilogy, Part Three: 1666, was released on July 16.
On July 19, 1978, Ziggy Berman from Shadyside is accused of stealing by Sheila, a Sunnyvale camper, and her friends. They accuse her of being a witch and in retaliation, hang her from a tree and burn her arm with a lighter before camp counselors Nick Goode and Kurt intervene. Ziggy's older sister, Cindy, and her boyfriend Tommy Slater are cleaning the mess hall when Nurse Lane, the mother of Ruby Lane, attacks Tommy, but he overpowers her and she is later removed from camp by police. The teenagers from Sunnyvale believe she was possessed by Sarah Fier, as was her daughter. While investigating the infirmary, Cindy and Tommy encounter counselors Alice, Cindy's former friend, and her boyfriend Arnie. They find Lane's diary which says that Fier made a deal with the devil by cutting off her hand on Satan's stone, thereby earning eternal life. They also find a map in the diary leading to Fier's house.
At the house, they find empty graves dug up by Nurse Lane and discover the witch's mark below the house. Alice and Cindy find a wall carved with the names of all the Shadyside killers and Tommy's name included. Tommy, now possessed, kills Arnie with an axe, and the girls escape into a cave. At camp, Nick helps Ziggy prank Sheila and lock her in the outhouse. As the two bond and share a kiss, Tommy reaches the camp and murders several Shadyside campers, including counselor Joan. Meanwhile, Cindy and Alice try to escape using the witch's mark in the diary as a map of the cave. They soon come across a pile of beating organs and when Alice touches it, it shows her flashbacks of all the past killers and their victims. After Alice injures her leg, she reconciles with Cindy and the two reach a cave opening beneath the outhouse.
After fighting an angry Sheila and knocking her unconscious, Ziggy and counselor Gary try to rescue Alice and Cindy until Tommy decapitates Gary. Ziggy hides with Nick until he is injured by Tommy and escapes to the mess hall. As the rest of the camp leaves via bus, Cindy finds a route to the mess hall while Alice stays behind. Tommy attacks Ziggy, but Cindy intervenes and kills him. Alice arrives and tells them that she found the witch's hand. She had started bleeding and realized that she was sitting near Satan's stone, where she dug it out.
The trio decides to end the curse by reuniting Sarah's hand with the body. Ziggy suddenly bleeds on the hand and sees a vision of Sarah Fier. This triggers the curse, resurrecting several Shadyside killers. A reanimated Tommy kills Alice before Cindy decapitates him. Ziggy and Cindy run to the tree where Fier was hanged, with the Shadyside killers in pursuit. They dig around the tree, only to find a rock with the words "The witch forever lives" carved. When Cindy realizes the killers are after Ziggy, she drops the hand and sacrifices herself. The two are murdered and the killers disappear. Nick later finds them and saves Ziggy via CPR.
Back in 1994, Deena and Josh realize that C. Berman is Ziggy, whose real name is Christine. They tell her that they found the witch's body and now, with the hand, they can end the curse. Deena and Josh go to Shadyside Mall, which was built after the closure of Camp Nightwing, and dig out the hand from under the same tree. They take it to the place where the body is buried and Deena reunites the body with the hand. Deena's nose bleeds and she finds herself back in 1666, where she is now Sarah Fier.
On October 9, 2015, it was announced that a film based on Stine's Fear Street series was being developed by 20th Century Studios (then known as 20th Century Fox before its acquisition by Disney) and Chernin Entertainment.[3] Screenwriter Zak Olkewicz was hired to write the script for the second film while Kyle Killen and Silka Lusia were assigned to Part One and Part Three respectively.[4][5] In July 2017, Leigh Janiak was hired to lead the project, directing and rewriting the films.[2][6][7] Janiak oversaw a writers room with her writing partner, Phil Graziadei.[8] In January 2019, Alex Ross Perry was slated to direct the second installment.[9][10] By March of that year, Perry stepped down, and Janiak was confirmed as directing all three films,[11] a trilogy set in different time periods, and shot back-to-back, with the intention of releasing the films one month apart.[6]
The first film of the trilogy was scheduled to be released theatrically in June 2020,[19] but it was pulled from the schedule because of the COVID-19 pandemic.[20] In April 2020, Chernin Entertainment ended their distribution deal with 20th Century Studios and made a multi-year first-look deal with Netflix.[21] By August 2020, Netflix had acquired the distribution rights to the Fear Street trilogy.[22][20] The film premiered at the Los Angeles State Historic Park on July 8, 2021 before it was released on Netflix on July 9, 2021.[23][1]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 87% based on 109 reviews, with an average rating of 6.9/10. The website's critics consensus states, "A smart and subversive twist on slasher horror, Fear Street Part II: 1978 shows that summer camp has never been scarier thanks to stellar performances from Sadie Sink, Emily Rudd, and Ryan Simpkins."[24] According to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 61 out of 100 based on 16 critics, the film received "generally favorable reviews".[25]
Natalia Winkelman, in her review of the Fear Street trilogy for The New York Times, described 1978 as being the strongest film in the trilogy, and wrote: "the change in scenery ensures that "Part Two" never feels like a clone of "Part One"."[26] Writing for Empire, Ian Freer gave the film a score of 3 stars out of 5, writing: "It might not work as well as Part One: 1994, but it cements the idea that telling a narrative in feature-length installments ... can be a fruitful mode for ambitious long-form storytelling", but stated: "As the plot splits the teens up, there is little of the engaging interplay between the friends of the first part and, with only one type of maniac on the loose, the kills themselves feel same-y, less imaginative."[27]
Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter described the film as being "its own exhilarating adventure that showcases a dynamic cast of characters and revels in lots and lots of bloody murder." She concluded: "For me, the best parts of Fear Street Part 2 are the ones in which the teen drama takes center stage — from the illicit romantic pairings to the crazy feuds and pranks. Genre purists will be relieved that none of that comes at the expense of grisly murder scenes; Janiak spares no one, and there's no shortage of inventive deaths."[28]Kevin Maher of The Times gave the film a score of 3 stars out of 5, writing: "As with the first outing, the director Leigh Janiak proves herself an impeccable stylist, delivering muted 1970s tones, judiciously judged scares and ceaseless tap-a-long tunes".[29]
Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com gave the film a score of 2 out of 4 stars. He wrote that the "hacking is top-notch", and praised the score by Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts, but concluded that the film is "a frustrating bummer—a summer camp slasher that's afraid of campiness, and one that'd be a better fit for group therapy sessions than sleepovers."[30] Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail wrote: "While Part One stands as a fine-enough ode to the slasher renaissance of the mid-1990s ... Part Two proves that the entire Fear Street enterprise could have easily kept its time-hopping ambitions to a two-hour kill fest", adding: "the big and bloody problem with Part Two is that, by making a horror flick set at a 1970s summer camp with a contemporary perspective and budget, director Leigh Janiak has set herself up for failure."[31]
Robert Lawrence Stine, sometimes known as Jovial Bob Stine and Eric Affabee, is an American novelist, short story writer, television producer, screenwriter, and executive editor.
Searchlight Pictures is an American film production and distribution arm of Walt Disney Studios, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company's Disney Entertainment division. Founded in 1994 as Fox Searchlight Pictures for 20th Century Fox, the studio focuses primarily on producing, distributing, and acquiring specialty films.
Fear Street is a teenage horror fiction series written by American author R. L. Stine, starting in 1989. In 1995, a series of books inspired by the Fear Street series, called Ghosts of Fear Street, was created for younger readers, and were more like the Goosebumps books in that they featured paranormal adversaries and sometimes had twist endings.
Fox 2000 Pictures was an American film production company within The Walt Disney Studios. It was a sister studio of the larger film studios 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures, specializing in producing independent films in mid-range releases that largely targeted underserved groups. The company dissolved on May 14, 2021, following the release of The Woman in the Window on Netflix, and the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company on March 20, 2019.
Gillian MacLaren Jacobs is an American actress. She is known for playing Britta Perry in the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), Mickey Dobbs in the Netflix romantic comedy series Love (2016–2018), and Mary Jayne Gold in Transatlantic (2023), also on Netflix. Her other notable television roles include Mimi-Rose Howard in the fourth season of the HBO comedy-drama series Girls (2015) and Atom Eve in the animated superhero series Invincible (2021–present).
Fred Hechinger is an American actor. He began his career with supporting roles in such films as the coming-of-age film Eighth Grade (2018), the period drama News of the World (2020), and the psychological thriller The Woman in the Window (2021). Also in 2021, he starred in the Netflix horror The Fear Street Trilogy (2021) and the first season of the HBO anthology series The White Lotus (2021). He has since portrayed Seth Warshavsky in the miniseries Pam & Tommy (2022).
Benjamin Christopher Flores Jr., also known as Lil' P-Nut, is an American actor and rapper. In music, he is known for his song "You Might Be the One". In acting, Flores starred as Louie Preston on the Nickelodeon television series The Haunted Hathaways (2013–2015), and as Triple G on the Nickelodeon series Game Shakers (2015–2019).
21 Laps Entertainment is a film and television production company founded and run by filmmaker Shawn Levy. The company is best known as the producers of Stranger Things, and exclusively distributes content through a partnership with Netflix. It has also produced films like Arrival, Free Guy, The Adam Project, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Spectacular Now, Real Steel, Deadpool & Wolverine, and the Night at the Museum franchise. The companies' current name originates from the number of laps Levy's oldest daughter ran in a jogathon when she was 5 years old.
Chernin Entertainment is an American film and television production company founded and owned by producer and former media executive Peter Chernin, who serves as chairman and CEO of the company. Jenno Topping is the president of film and television, with David Ready serving as EVP of film and TV. Kristen Campo is the EVP of television. Twenty-seven films have been produced by the company, most of them with 20th Century Fox.
Sadie Elizabeth Sink is an American actress. She began acting at age seven in local theater productions, and played the title role in Annie (2012–14) and young Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience (2015) on Broadway. She made her film debut in the biographical sports drama Chuck (2016).
David Ready is an American film producer and production executive, and the current EVP at Chernin Entertainment.
Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a 2021 American supernatural slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak, with a script co-written by Phil Graziadei, and Janiak, from an original story by Kyle Killen, Graziadei, and Janiak. Based on the book series of the same name by R. L. Stine, it is the first installment in the Fear Street trilogy and stars Kiana Madeira, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger, Ashley Zukerman, Darrell Britt-Gibson, and Maya Hawke. The film follows a teen and her friends after a series of brutal slayings, as they take on an evil force that’s plagued their notorious town for centuries.
20th Century Family is a division of 20th Century Studios which produces family-friendly films and television programs. Besides theatrical films, the division oversees mixed media, family animated holiday television specials based on film properties, and film features based on TV shows.
Fear Street Part Three: 1666 is a 2021 American supernatural horror film directed by Leigh Janiak, who co-wrote the screenplay with Phil Graziadei, and Kate Trefry. Based on the book series of the same name by R. L. Stine, it is the third and final installment of the Fear Street trilogy after Part One: 1994 and Part Two: 1978 and stars Kiana Madeira, Ashley Zukerman, Gillian Jacobs, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., and Darrell Britt-Gibson. The film follows the origins of Shadyside's curse in the mid-17th century and the survivors in 1994 who try to put an end to it.
Leigh Anne Janiak is an American film director and screenwriter. She is best known for directing the horror films Honeymoon (2014) and the Fear Street Trilogy (2021).
The Fear Street Trilogy is a 2021 American horror film series, spanning multiple subgenres, particularly the slasher and supernatural subgenres. Directed by Leigh Janiak from scripts and stories she co-wrote with other contributors, the films are based on R. L. Stine's book series of the same name. The overall story revolves around teenagers who work to break the curse that has been over their town for hundreds of years. Produced and developed by 20th Century Studios and Chernin Entertainment, the film's distribution rights were eventually acquired by Netflix following The Walt Disney Company's purchase of 21st Century Fox.
Kiana Madeira is a Canadian actress. She starred as Moe in the Netflix television series Trinkets. Madeira played Deena in the 2021 Netflix horror film trilogy Fear Street.
Olivia Scott Welch, also known as Olivia Welch, is an American actress. She portrayed Samantha "Sam" Fraser in the Netflix horror film trilogy Fear Street and Heather Nill in the Prime Video series Panic.
Emily Ellen Rudd is an American actress. She is known for playing the dual roles of Cindy and Abigail Berman in the Netflix horror film trilogy Fear Street (2021), and Nami in the Netflix series One Piece (2023).
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