As a public high school teacher, I can attest to the fact that there is truly no time like summertime. The school year wraps up, the kids rush out of the building, and a time of what seems to be endless freedom begins. Teachers look forward to this time just as much (if not moreso) as the students do. The summer of 2021 was no exception. As a massive fan of all things cinema (with a particular tilt toward the horror genre), I couldn’t have been more excited to see Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy arrive on Netflix. From the opening mall massacre of 1994 to the riveting, Salem-Esque hysteria of 1666, I was transfixed by this tale of a town seemingly cursed to see its most vulnerable slaughtered in droves while a nearby neighbor seemed to thrive more and more as time passed. These films stood out to me because they were familiar. They felt like home.
By no means do I live in a town with such a high annual body count. I live in a town nestled near the mountains of Northwest Georgia (about an hour’s drive from Atlanta), where the most exciting thing to happen in the last few years was the arrival of a Buc-ee’s nearby (if you’ve never heard of the mega gas station chain, look it up). You won’t find the awful crimes that plagued Shadyside in my town. However, what you will find is something all too common around the country and around the world: favoritism, isolation, and marginalization. Take out your pens and paper. Put away those phones. It’s time for school.
The county school system that employs me as a teacher has two high schools, North Falls High School, situated on the city outskirts, and Gardener High School, located in the center of the city’s business district. Gardener is named for the town itself, while North Falls sports a location-based name that plays on the name of the county. Gardener has so many sports state championships (mainly for football, the cash cow of American sports) that they barely have room to display them all, while North Falls celebrates simply winning games at all. Gardener has money, North Falls does not. These comparisons are endless. I teach at the school that celebrates a single win in any sport like we just hit the lottery. If the two schools were Sunnyvale and Shadyside, I teach at Shadyside.
The three chapters that make up Fear Street felt true to me because I have lived them for years. Gardener is lavished with praise, showered with funds, and lifted up as the grand standard of public education. Gardener’s teachers are taken care of and supported, its students fostered and mentored, and its community is involved and informed. The direct opposite could be said about my town’s own version of Shadyside, North Falls. North Falls is old, underfunded, and treated as an afterthought. Parents are not informed and thus are not involved. Sports programs struggle on the field and can’t draw a crowd outside of it. Academics are lax and not supported. It is staffed by older teachers counting the days until retirement and new teachers unprepared for the challenge of teaching in a dying building.
I understand the absurdity of comparing a thriving school and a struggling one to a literal deal with the devil that sacrifices citizens of the lesser-than community for continued prominence. However, close to a decade of employment and submersion in the lesser-than culture has proven that marginalization comes in many toxic forms. The history of the world we live in is littered with stories of entire groups of people being demonized for being different. Fear Street reminds us of the dangers of vilifying others based on such minor things as location, wealth, skin color, sexual orientation, the list goes on. The story of two schools in Georgia mirrors the story of Fear Street, which in turn mirrors the story of human history.
Gardener High School basks in the same kind of praise that Sunnyvale received in the films. News coverage of the school focuses on the good it does for the community, its sports success, and the great things that former students have gone on to do in the world at large. Meanwhile, North Falls makes the local paper for far more nefarious reasons. Kids getting locked up or causing trouble, administration errors, test score controversies, and many other things can shine a bad light on a school. Its few successes are tossed aside by the town in favor of the juicy gossip, with locals barely able to contain their glee at the school’s latest example of sticking its foot in its mouth. The butt of endless jokes and the source of a lot of misery, the pervasive label of being lesser-than has poisoned the entire institution. Teachers hate their work, parents remove their kids from the school or don’t care enough to contribute in any way, and the kids themselves walk through high school with their heads down and eyes rolled, lamenting their luck at going to the “trashy” school. North Falls High School cannot trace its misfortunes to an executed witch from generations prior. It has seemingly always existed under the dark cloud of oppression, barely surviving year to year while its flashier neighbor basks in the adoration of an entire community.
Fear Street begins and ends with the story of Sarah Fier, a witch executed by hanging who according to legend cursed the town of Shadyside before her death. This curse possesses seemingly innocent people, causing them to snap and rampage through the community, killing countless others. The tragedies are explained away as nothing more than normal people snapping, a regular occurrence in Shadyside. The trilogy explores marginalization through three different films with three different lenses, the first being through the slasher film resurgence of the 90s, the second through the 70s’ and 80s’ obsession with summer camp splatter fare, and finally (and most interestingly) through the witch trial hysteria of the 1600s. The strong Sunnyvale community has preyed upon Shadyside for years, turning a blind eye to their bloody misfortune as their own fortunes continually improve. The treacherous Nick Goode (and his entire bloodline) treated Shadyside and its citizens as nothing more than pigs led to slaughter, a necessary evil to continue strengthening their grip on power.
Our heroes in the trilogy are among the have-nots. There’s Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her younger brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr). Josh is your typical nerd, spending hours chatting with strangers online and researching serial killers, gathering crucial Shadyside history knowledge in the process. Deena bears a Scarlet Letter so often worn by people today, that being homosexuality, as she is struggling to make things work with her girlfriend, Sam (Olivia Scott Welch). Meanwhile, Deena’s friends Kate (Julia Rehwald), a valedictorian with a penchant for selling drugs for money, and Simon (Fred Hechinger), a goofy, over-the-top loudmouth who comes from a broken home requiring him to take on more responsibilities that no teenager should ever have to take on, float through life with a lack of hope and a grim acceptance of their fate. Sam presents an interesting dichotomy, as she is from Shadyside and yet is attempting to change her life over to the Sunnyvale way, moving with her mother to the more affluent town nearby, joining the cheerleading squad, and hanging around the snobs who thumb their noses at Shadysiders and laugh at their pain and misfortune.
Sam’s desire to leave Shadyside and fit in with those from Sunnyvale is mirrored in the trilogy’s second (and arguably strongest) chapter, 1978. This film takes us back to the massacre at Camp Nightwing, yet another bloody chapter in Shadyside’s sordid history. The two main characters, sisters Ziggy (Sadie Sink) and Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd), have a similar dynamic to Deena and Sam, in that the older Cindy longs to make more of her life than what Shadyside has to offer. She changes her clothes, cleans up her act to be nicer and more acceptable, and leaves behind friendships and other bonds to forge new ones in a better setting, leaving Ziggy to fend for herself in the maddening craze of trying to stay afloat in the shark tank that is Shadyside. The message is repeated to Sam by Deena, and then to Cindy by both Ziggy and her former friend, Alice (Ryan Simpkins), that there is no escaping Shadyside. One can change their clothes, get new friends, and even move schools, but the stain of being less-than forever follows them.
The most horrifying comparison that can be made between the two warring communities of the trilogy and the two schools in my town is the attitude of the lesser-thans. Students, parents, and teachers at North Falls have accepted their fate. We are the trashy school. Nothing good happens to us, we simply get to exist while the school across town thrives. Shadyside kids embrace the fun of Sarah Fier’s legend as more of a “fucked up Santa Claus,” as Kate lovingly puts it, all the while feeding into the dread and hopelessness of being cursed simply for being born in the wrong place. Being from Shadyside is a curse one can never escape. North Falls is viewed the same way, as the students who attend there have accepted their role, resigning themselves to the notion that things will not get better.
The persecution of those society views as lesser is at the core of these films. Persecution can come in many forms, and the ways that the mighty have learned to control the meek are well-practiced. The true horror of Fear Street is that as we watch it, we see people we know (whether on the side of Sunnyvale or Shadyside). Our mom could be Sam’s mother who snatches her daughter’s arm in public, infuriated at the notion that her daughter is dating a girl. We could have friends like Kate & Simon, who work as hard as they can to make better lives for themselves and their loved ones, and yet still must smile and laugh in the face of the world telling them they are better off dead. Our father, teacher, pastor, or anyone else could even be Nick Goode (Ashley Zukerman), one who pretends to work at making the world a better place, all the while taking steps to make life impossible for the less fortunate, the outcasts, and the damned. 1666’s exploration of the fear and hysteria that swept communities over witchcraft accusations ended the trilogy with an exclamation point, turning a mirror at the viewer and showing us, through one of history’s most vile examples of mob mentality, our own role in feeding into the persecution system. We recognize our towns, our schools, and our churches on one side or the other, and we marvel at what has gotten us to this point. Fear Street forces us to reflect on persecution, bigotry, hatred, and our own culpability in either standing by and letting it happen, or our direct participation in it.
Life is made up of teachable moments. Whether it is our children or someone else’s, we must do our best to help the next generation come into their own and learn the ways of the world. Reflecting on my own life and career, perhaps there is more I could be doing to help my students see that they are so much more than the school they attend, the clothes they wear (polo shirt or otherwise), and the family they are a part of. I strive to help my students see their value in every interaction we have. It doesn’t matter that they don’t go to the fancy school across town or that their sports team isn’t in the newspaper every week. Those things being true does not make them have any less value as people, just as having a certain skin color or partner preference or anything else also does not diminish their worth. The residents of Shadyside were more than the curse thrust upon them. They were more than the residents of Sunnyvale would have had them believe. Deena, Alice, and others mention that they are cursed by being from Shadyside, but that is not true, just as it’s not true for the students of North Falls High School.
Intolerance must always be rejected forcefully. The Goode bloodline got away with their scheme for years (generations, even), directly by the inaction and indifference of others. It took the brave stand taken by Deena, Sam, and the others to not just accept their fate as the forgotten, as the downtrodden, as the sacrifices, and instead face the issue of just what caused all this. Hatred is a disease, and if left untreated, can do irreparable damage. The Sunnyvale-Shadyside struggle reminded me not only of the struggle between North Falls and Gardener High Schools but also of the real power that hope has. Ziggy, Deena, and Alice are characters with no hope, seeing a gruesome death as their only way out of Shadyside. We need more people with intentions like Sam and Cindy, those willing to bridge the cavernous gap between communities and search for common ground. We also need those like Deena and the others, those willing to reject the lot handed to them by life and fight for something better.
Our worth as humans is rooted in so much more than where we are on a map. How we treat other people and how we choose to lift others up shows more of our character than a town affiliation ever could. Whether it’s Sunnyvale versus Shadyside, North Falls versus Gardener, White versus Black, Christian versus literally anything else (reminder, I do live in the south), or any other showdown that the ignorant minds of the world want to force, we leave our mark on this life by treating others the way we want to be treated. Everyone has worth, and the Fear Street trilogy reminded us all of that by hacking, slashing, and cursing its way into our lives in the summer of 2021. And as our world continues to spiral into a seemingly never-ending cycle of blame, conflict, and hatred, I pray we can remember that.
