Fear Street Part Two:1978 - review

If you have not read my review of the first Fear Street film in the trilogy, I highly recommend reading that review before this one but to each their own.

You may have heard of Goosebumps, a children's horror book series that I grew up reading myself. The author of this beloved children's series also penned a slightly more adult horror trilogy known as Fear Street. This series was adapted into a trilogy by Netflix in 2021 with three installments each taking place in a different year of the cursed area of town. This series contains more gore, violence, harsh language, and even concepts of steamy scenes making it much more edgy than Goosebumps will ever be. But does Fear Street deserve more applause and hype? Is Goosebumps the true star of R.L. Stine's line of work? Keep reading below for the first iteration of the Fear Street films.

Fear Street 1978 is the second in the franchise and by far, my favorite of the series! I skip the first and third films in the series and watch this one as a stand-alone film and I'm so beyond happy with it! The acting is chef's kiss with Sadie Sink (of Stranger Things fame) taking the spotlight and she needs to be in WAY MORE HORROR Movies!

Fear Street part two takes place in the summer of 1978 at Camp Nightwing, a summer camp in which Ziggy (Sadie Sink) and her older goody-two-shoes sister, Cindy (Emily Rudd) are intertwined into a killer summer of capture the flag. My key to finding the best film in a series is finding a film that could stand alone as its own movie without needing much context or follow-up from other films or properties within the canon and the second Fear Street installment is the best in the series!

There's not much I can say without spoilers creeping into the post so you've been warned...

Feart Street Part two: 1978 - Fan art

So I love that the curse is attacking the least suspecting people and I love the sister dynamic. I am the oldest sister and my younger sister is very much like Ziggy in my opinion and I can relate so heavily to Cindy (Ziggy's older sister) so much that it's the scariest part of watching the movie for me (lol)! There's such a pressure to be the leader for your younger sibling and be perfect and grow up and Cindy tries to get that point across to Ziggy and it feels so damn relatable to me.

I love that the curse impacts Cindy's calm, golden retriever boyfriend Tommy, and makes him become this faceless killer. It's such a perversion of the holy and the good that films do to make something more terrifying like we see in The Nun and The Conjuring movies with Christian beliefs and holidays. This loveable blonde teenage camp counselor is suddenly launched into the darkness by the Shadyside curse of Sarah Fier as outlined in the first Fear Street film and will be explained even more in-depth in the final installment of Fear Street: 1666, and knowing nothing about the curse or its origins makes the possession all the more sad and scary to watch as he slaughters these campers and his own friends and colleagues.

The climax of this film is one of my favorite scenes in all of horror film history with Ziggy and Cindy putting fighting aside to survive together from the cursed killers and Tommy and with the two running under Sarah Fier's (The witch who cursed Shadyside) tree and in the open plain while the possessed killers zero in on the girls. It's only then that the killers complete their curse, to kill the ones whose blood they smell which are the sisters who share the same blood, Ziggy and Cindy. The girls are murdered and lay bleeding out in the field and under the cursed tree in a poetic manner that is iconic and heart-shatteringly sad to watch as they lie dying but reaching out to each other. Given the girls have died, the killers disappear. A young Nick Goode (The sheriff from the first film) then runs towards Ziggy and starts her heart again meaning that she survived the curse and is the only one to do so. Ziggy gets rushed to the hospital and recovers and lives to tell our first film's protagonist Deena how she beat the curse.

I love this film and the climax is by far one of the best horror moments that I've ever seen and I can NOT stress the incredible filmmaking that went into the direction and planning of this movie. The visual effects of this film and the production design are just impeccable! The setting of the summer camp is somewhere on the East Coast in a small town with another feuding town is really close to my heart in a really weird way because I'm from a small East Coast town but never went to summer camp, grew up in the 2000's not the late 70's and my town didn't have a direct rival. This feels comfy to me though which is a feeling I can't explain.

I can't recommend this film enough and the only reason I am deducting a point from my rating is because of the anchor of being part of the Fear Street series which is not great in comparison to this masterpiece. So given that one caveat, I give Fear Street Part Two:1978 a 9/10