Officer Goode is Bad: Fear Street, Scream, and The Legacy of the Slasher in 2021
Arguably the most iconic film of the 90s slasher phenomenon, Wes Craven’s genre-defining Scream (1996) has its fair share of influence in modern horror flicks. The classic hour and a half of campy gore solidifies tropes like The Final Girl and revenge driven murder sprees. In many ways, Netflix’s recent horror trilogy Fear Street (2021) pays homage to the essential plot points of a slasher, yet uses them as a vehicle for social commentary.
While Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is often considered the first horror/thriller combination which would later become the “slasher,” the term wasn’t coined until 1993 by Professor Carol J. Clover. The slasher, “or splatter or shocker or stalker,” (Clover 21) has a series of staples which qualify a film as part of the niche genre. The slasher’s story structure, according to American cinema scholar Richard Nowell, is “characterized by ‘a shadowy blade-wielding killer responding to an event by stalking and murdering the members of a youth group before the threat s/he powses is neutralized.’” (Clayton 7) Put simply, slashers are bloodbaths in which a targeted group of people are chased and mostly killed by a weapon other than a gun by a killer who is psychotic, but “still recognizably human”. (Clover 23) This is often accompanied by useless authorities and/or law enforcement, and a recurring idea which claims that evil (perhaps generations of killers or multiple people using the same name) never dies. If Scream is the nearly perfect model of a classic slasher, how does the modernized genre compare in Fear Street? From the moment the latter film begins, parallels are prolific. It opens with a gruesome introductory murder starring a character insignificant to the main ensemble. In its most basic description, the Fear Street trilogy follows the staples of a slasher outlined in Armstrong’s book. Essentially, slashers involve (1) an introductory event that evokes future murders and (2) a “setting that doesn’t inspire terror.” Kent Byron Armstrong places emphasis specifically on the opening scene archetype and its importance in “[providing] the audience with an accurate display of the murderer’s lethal abilities.” (Armstrong 1) Demonstrating Armstrong’s argument, the beginning sequence in Fear Street: 1994 pays homage to that of Scream. Both are set in a confined space (a mall instead of a house), allow the main villain to off an unimportant teenage girl and display his abilities, and hints at the string of murders that will occur in each plot. The two also obviously each meet slasher staples 3-5: on-screen kills, a human-like killer, systematic killing, and the (6): a theme connecting each murder. In Scream, the murder spree is driven by revenge on the protagonist’s mother. In contrast, Fear Street’s kills are the result of a series of serial killers over generations that are thought to be influenced by a witch’s curse but are revealed to be the product of a family’s oath with the devil. The final and only contestable staple of the slasher listed by Armstrong is a bleak or unresolved ending. Fear Street as a whole three film arc does have an apparent “happy ending,” but the mid-credits scene does leave the story open. So, considering all the factors, can a Netflix horror movie trilogy in 2021 truly be deemed a slasher? At its core, yes.
Often in horror, and in slashers specifically, tokenism plays a part in character arcs and plot. “Minority” roles such as a gay character or a Black character are cast solely for the sake of performative inclusivity, and then are killed off. Token characters are almost always casualties and have been known to be the first to die. In fact, in Scream 2 (1997), all three Black characters die, two of whom are killed before the credits roll in the opening scene. Scream 3’s (2000) sole Black character also dies, though he is not the first. Not only does Fear Street include social commentary on racism in law enforcement, but the three surviving protagonists are a Black lesbian woman, her brother, and her girlfriend. The trilogy’s main character, Deena, is the antithesis of the Final Girl trope as it serves the masculine gaze, yet also the embodiment of its strengths. The Final Girl, according to Carol J. Clover in her essay Her Body, Himself (1987), is “abject terror personified” (Clover 35) and the sole survivor of her friends. She can be identified easily as the watchful “good girl” stereotype; the Final Girl is “the Girl Scout, the bookworm, the mechanic” who is often a virgin and almost always “is not sexually active.” (Clover 39) She is tough, not feminine in the way her friends are. Additionally, the Final Girl is, like most main character archetypes, cishet and white. Laurie from the iconic 1978 slasher Halloween is a prime example of the widely accepted description of the Final Girl. In Scream, Sydney is noticeably more observant than her friends, a virgin, and, apparently, sexually repressed at the time of the story. She is white, seemingly cishet, and the last of her friends left alive by the end of the movie–Sydney is very much so a Final Girl. Deena is also observant, but she’s not leagues smarter than her peers. She’s not the girl-next-door type, nor is she at all sexually or romantically “rigid.” Clover says that “the Final Girl is boyish, in a word,” and while Deena isn’t necessarily feminine, she’s also not a tomboy. She’s not “set apart from the other girls” (Clover 40) because of her competence. Interestingly, she has a typical girl’s name. Clover points out that many Final Girls’ boyishness is evident in their names. Sydney Prescott is often called Syd, an androgynous and often boy’s name. The same goes for Laurie. The Final Girl in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) is nicknamed Stretch. Deena having a feminine name already sets her apart from other Final Girls. Lastly, Deena isn’t even the sole survivor of her team of friends. While she does compare to the Final Girl because of her leading role in the films and because she is the one to kill the villain, in the end, she is not the last one standing. Deena is, in a sense, the token character turned protagonist–the Anti-Final Girl. Her presence makes Fear Street modern in this way–most aspects of Deena’s character, such as her sexuality and race, would typically qualify her a token character or Final Girl archetype, yet her role as the hero introduces a timely and welcome change in horror character stereotypes.
Fear Street is formulaically a slasher, yes. It’s incredibly violent and gory. However, is there more? Perhaps the trilogy uses the slasher genre as a vehicle for social commentary, whereas Scream is just campy horror for fun. Fear Street follows the essentials of a slasher in order to fit into its genre, but details of its plot reveal the horrors of society as well. It’s at this point in this piece that I’ll admit that Fear Street isn’t really that great of a film series. It’s objectively a little lackluster because of how formulaic it is. However, it’s simply entertaining, and its attempt at using character dynamics to reflect humanity is notable in the film industry and especially in a subgenre as predictable as the slasher. To give context, there is a turf war of sorts that surprisingly plays into Fear Street’s entire plot. Shadyside is known as the Killer Capital of the USA while Sunnyvale, right next to it, is “a nice place to live.” A Sunnyvale family has been enacting a generational curse targeting Shadyside residents for the devil to use as puppets in exchange for prosperity and influence, but both towns are convinced that the killers are the product of a vengeful witch, Sarah Fier. However, it’s revealed that Sarah was only labeled a witch by an ancestor of this family because she was a lesbian. In both 1978 and 1994, the initiator of the curse is the brother of Sunnvale’s mayor, and is the authority figure that shows up at one of the first signs of something wrong: a cop named Nick Goode. Just as Sarah was condemned by influential figures in her time period, the residents of Shadyside in 1994 are doomed by a police officer. In a brilliant line of dialogue, Deena exclaims, “You guys, Goode is bad” when she realizes this. Jokes aside, though, this commentary cannot be any less subtle. Fear Street illustrates that there is corruption in authority so intense that it preys specifically on the disadvantaged. The privileges and success that the Goode family (the authority) enjoy are a direct result of Shadyside’s (the underprivileged population’s) suffering. The simplicity of this metaphor in combination with the comparison between evil and privilege used as a weapon presents the trilogy’s commentary in a noticeably accessible way for its main audience of young teens to understand.
Here’s the thing–I’m not here to argue that Fear Street is an amazingly done, poetic story. For all the complicated and profound film student analyses I could use to chip away at it, it’s an evidently cheesy supernatural teen horror/mystery. Yes, the ideas behind this trilogy are better than the execution, but, simply put, it’s fun to watch. So, is Fear Street the modern slasher? It lives up to its iconic predecessors, namely Scream, and checks off the basic elements. It also says something more about society with its plot. Does it do so well? Not particularly, but it carries on the legacy of the slasher film while using its platform as a Netflix feature to get a more meaningful point across. Ultimately, it’s a palatable slasher for modern viewers.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Kent Byron. Slasher Films: an International Filmography, 1960 through 2001. Mcfarland, 2008.
Clayton, Wickham. Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. British Film Institute, 1996.