Fear Street Part Three: 1666 review – The weakest in Netflix’s trilogy still ends on a gore-fuelled high

Dir: Leigh Janiak. Starring: Kiana Madeira, Olivia Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr, Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger. 18, 113 mins.

Fear Street, Netflix’s new horror trilogy, has mined most of its pleasures from the realm of memory. Its first two instalments, set in 1994 and 1978, were catered to those who’d grown up reading RL Stine’s ghost stories or devoured VHS copies of Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp at far too young an age. But you can’t exactly say anyone is nostalgic for the year 1666. Fear Street sacrifices a large chunk of its appeal by dialling back the centuries to tell the story of Sarah Fier, the witch who trapped Shadyside in an endless cycle of violence. But there’s much more at play here, and even though Part Three is the weakest of the trilogy, director Leigh Janiak still manages to end on a high.

So far, we’ve watched two teens from 1994, Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her now-possessed girlfriend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), unravel the mystery of Shadyside, a town plagued by murders and massacres committed by seemingly ordinary citizens. Having recovered the hand of Fier and reunited it with her skeletal corpse, Deena is pulled into the witch’s memories and must relive her final days. Now the truth will be known – and it’s no surprise that the wicked woman is not all that she seems, and that her history has been rewritten by the men who feared and resented her.

There’s a long history of Puritan and folk horror that Fear Street could have drawn on, especially 1968’s Witchfinder General, but Janiak never settles on a single, distinct approach. The cool-toned, grey-flecked palette and stark approach to gore seems borrowed from 2015’s The Witch. So does its attempt to replicate period-accurate accents, though it pulls much of cast out of their comfort zones and results in a rollercoaster of garbled tones. Madeira, who’s been such a likeable and grounded lead up to this point, particularly struggles to keep her modern American twang from popping up like a groundhog checking to see whether spring has come.

In her defence, the film itself can’t quite choose between faithfully recreating the past (or, at least, some Hollywood version of it) and applying a contemporary spin. Characters are all decked out in bonnets and pilgrim buckles but will still call each other “frigid bitches” – an insult I can’t imagine was particularly popular in the 17th-century colonies. Thankfully, the title of this film is a little deceptive – it only partially takes place in 1666, with Deena regaining her 1994 consciousness in order to break the curse for good.

It’s here that screenwriters Janiak, Phil Graziadei, and Kate Trefry bring together all their themes of oppression, fatalism, and segregation, in a thrilling finale that Janiak doses once more in old-school gore and deliciously garish neon. The journey may have been a little bumpy, but Fear Street Part Three sticks the landing with style.