Review: Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021)

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 answers the lingering questions for the trilogy and resolves the narrative conflict, but in an unsatisfying manner. It’s bolder than its predecessors and asks more of its cast. It’s certainly the most ambitious of the three, and yet, it’s the only Fear Street film that doesn’t quite work. Despite Leigh Janiak’s well-founded trust in her cast and her desire to trace an elaborate mythology over the course of hundreds of years, the film’s structure undoes its dramatic effect. Where 1994 and 1978 work as distinct films in a trilogy, 1666 is something of a grab-bag of storylines without a unifying story arc. Fear Street Part Three: 1666 is essentially two separate one-hour television episodes placed back-to-back, even with two separate title cards. This choice undoes the tidy structure of the filmic trilogy and robs the film of narrative momentum. Furthermore, it makes me question the notion of making Fear Street a trilogy of films and not a miniseries in the first place.

The first half works well as it takes us back to 1666 and introduces us to Sarah Fier and the other pilgrims living in the settlement that will become known as Shadyside. We observe Sarah’s relationships with friends and family and her secret romance with another young woman in the village. Eventually, religious zealots in the village uncover this romance and claim it’s a result of Satanic influences. Sarah is labeled a witch and the legend of the curse is born.

Leigh Janiak’s biggest gamble in this first half is having the actors from the previous films play the villagers, including Kiana Madeira playing Sarah Fier, Benjamin Flores Jr. playing her brother, Henry, and Olivia Scott Welch playing her romantic interest, Hannah Miller. The decision mostly pays off, despite the young actors’ occasional struggles with accents. For one, it allows Janiak to circumvent exposition and get right into the central conflict, as she relies on our familiarity with the actors and their relationships with each other in the previous films to inform their relationships in 1666. For instance, we don’t need to be introduced to Sarah’s brother, since we know it’s her brother because Benjamin Flores Jr. is playing him, and we don’t need to spend much time building the romance between Sarah and Hannah, since Kiana Madeira and Olivia Scott Welch recreate their dynamic from 1994. They’re technically different characters, but they’re fulfilling similar roles in different time periods. It’s a smart way to skip over expository introductions and allow the actors to dig deeper into their character types without losing the viewer in the process.

But more importantly, it creates a cyclical aspect to the storytelling that plays into the trilogy structure and the series’ interest in repetition. In 1994, we learn that people in Shadyside periodically go insane and murder the people around them. The curse affects everyone and constantly repeats the same cycle over the years, trapping the residents of the town in a nightmarish world where they can fall prey to demonic powers at any moment. 1666 clarifies this and makes this cyclical aspect a part of the emotional storytelling. It draws in this thematic detail from the margins of the series’ mythology and makes it a part of the actual story itself.

All of this is interesting, as is the Puritan setting and competent production design, which plays like The Witch for teens, and the scenes of forbidden trysts in the woods and grisly murders with religious implications. The problem is that Fear Street Part Three: 1666 is not entirely set in 1666. After finally depicting the story of Sarah Fier and allowing us to understand her as a character, not just a legendary figure, the film comes back to 1994 for “Fear Street: 1994 – Part 2” according to the inter-film title card. The actual story that we get in this part is fine; it resolves the relationships and conflicts of 1994, while also incorporating the new information learned in 1666. But the decision to bifurcate the structure this way makes 1666 feel like one long flashback.

Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic and not allowing the trilogy to bend the rules, which are already plenty malleable due to the nature of streaming entertainment. But the filmmakers have made a movie trilogy that ends up more like a miniseries. The first two films, no matter how connected they are, function as separate self-contained narratives, with their own structural builds and resolutions. They both have distinct beginnings and ends. This movie works as two completely separate narratives but is presented as a single one. It has two arcs, two resolutions, and even two title cards, but there’s no tidy mirroring in the two halves of the film’s structure that would justify the narrative dualism.

If the filmmakers wanted to present the series this way, why not make Fear Street a miniseries? Break it into six episodes and then the shift from 1666 back to 1994 wouldn’t be so jarring. Or rather, they could’ve elongated the two halves here and made four separate movies. But they didn’t do that. They made it a movie trilogy, which has certain structural obligations that this film whiffs on. I’m hesitant to recommend alternate ways a film should’ve been made in the midst of a review, but cutting back and forth between the past and the present during this film would’ve resolved most of my complaints. It would’ve allowed us to learn about the past and resolve the present without sacrificing a coherent structure and the narrative momentum that comes with it.

There’s still a lot to like about the Fear Street series as a whole and 1666 in particular. As well, a horror series having an unsatisfying conclusion is nothing new. But an unsatisfying conclusion is still an unsatisfying conclusion. An ambiguous medium of presentation is not an excuse for a muddled manner of presentation. Structure matters in storytelling, even in the age of streaming.

5 out of 10

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021, USA)

Directed by Leigh Janiak; written by Phil Graziadei, Leigh Janiak, and Kate Trefry, based on Fear Street by R. L. Stine; starring Kiana Madeira, Ashley Zukerman, Gillian Jacobs, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Darrell Britt-Gibson.

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