Fear Street Part Two: 1978 review – As giddy, gory, and thoroughly self-aware as its predecessor

Dir: Leigh Janiak. Starring: Sadie Sink, Emily Rudd, McCabe Slye, Gillian Jacobs. Cert18, 110 mins

Netflix’s weaponised nostalgia, so shrewdly deployed in its hit series Stranger Things, has mutated into a fiercer, altogether more daring beast in Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy. Its first instalment, set in 1994, takes the familiar comforts of RL Stine’s source material from the era and steeps them in blood, bones, and viscera. It’s a horror film lovingly tailored to the tastes of those who grew up on Stine’s work, including his famous Goosebumps books, and have since uncovered all that the genre has to offer those with a feral imagination and a strong stomach.

Part Two, set in 1978, continues that mission with equal, maniacal drive. Janiak revisits the slashers of the late Seventies and early Eighties through a distinctly Nineties lens, making it giddy, gory, and thoroughly self-aware. A rusted axe is struck right through the centre of the old binaries – the sexually active aren’t punished for the deeds, while the virginal aren’t rewarded for their purity. At the end of Part One, Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr), had successfully tracked down Constance Berman (Gillian Jacobs), the sole survivor of the Camp Nightwing massacre (which took place over a decade and a half before) – just one in a long, cruel history of slayings committed by ordinary people touched by a witch’s curse.

The teens hope that they might learn the secret to eluding premature death by knife, axe, or industrial bread slicer. But as Constance’s story unfolds – the film is essentially one, long flashback – it becomes clear that whatever evil is at work is the product of much more than superstitious tricks and rickety, old bogeymen. “The past is never really past,” Christine warns. And Shadyside is much like Derry, the town at the centre of Stephen King’s It. The supernatural merely serves as the roots of a great tree of human despair.

Sisters Cindy (Emily Rudd) and Ziggy (Stranger Things’s Sadie Sink) are torn apart by their mismatched social ambitions. Cindy is working as a counsellor at Camp Nightwing in order to raise some college funds and eventually leave Shadyside. Ziggy has resolved herself to the idea that there is no leaving. They’re all cursed, in their own way. And when one of the counsellors starts hacking kids to pieces, it only confirms her theory.

Zak Olkewicz’s script anchors Janiak’s electric visuals – which nod generously to Friday the 13th without ever feeling bound to it – to the spectre of intergenerational trauma, aided by sincere and uncomplicated performances from Rudd and Sink. Sarah Fier, the witch behind it all, was herself a victim. Her rage and bitterness still cling to Shadyside like crude oil to a sea bird’s wings. The Fear Street trilogy may be a powerful piece of nostalgia, but it also has a real instinct for the cyclical nature of violence. It makes perfect sense that next week’s closer, set in 1666, will end where all this terror began.