Everything is a tease and meant to be the stage for the teen drama.

The problem with shows like Riverdale and Nancy Drew and Sabrina is that they only really touch on the eerie vibes they like to reference.

Indeed, the fact that Shadyside’s school mascot is a witch, hinting at the town’s shady past with a witch’s curse from 1666, feels very modern teen horror. On the surface, the story feels very Riverdale. But, it’s the tone, the cinematography, the set design that really catapults Fear Street into something more. Yes, Deena and Sam’s struggling relationship and Sam being closeted is a key plot point of the movie, and yes, the struggle the kids feel from being Shadyside townies who live in a seemingly bedeviled town is very real. Much of the strength of Fear Street lies in the excess of horror tropes and callbacks. The plot follows teenager Deena Johnson ( Kiana Madeira), her ex-girlfriend Samantha Fraser ( Olivia Scott Welch), Deena’s younger brother Josh ( Benjamin Flores Jr.), and their two friends Kate ( Julia Rehwald) and Simon ( Fred Hechinger). Home to some of the most gruesome murders in American history, Shadyside has been dubbed the murder capital of the country. The first part of the three films tells the story of two towns: the cursed wrong-side-of-the-tracks Shadyside and the uber-privileged uber-safe Sunnyvale. From Scream to Halloween, to Poltergeist, Fear Street Part 1 oozes horror tropes. It’s not hard to see the inspirations that Fear Street Part 1: 1994 pulls from. Every kid who grew up in the 90s and 00s remembers Stine’s iconic Goosebumps, but Fear Street touches on all the insecurities and struggles of teenage life while injecting copious amounts of horror tropes that add camp and pulls at the nostalgia strings. Stine‘s Fear Street books, and now they’ve made it to the streaming screen with Netflix’s movie trilogy.

Ghosts, witches, curses, murders, all that and more filled the pages of R.L.

Nancy drew video game tropes