Fear Street’s Queer Take on the Slasher Flick

On Queer Horror and Final Girls

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Editors note: The following contains spoilers for the Fear Street trilogy.  

Last month, Netflix released all three films in their Fear Street trilogy – based on the R.L. Stine books of the same name – which follows a group of teenagers as they try to break the curse that’s had a hold on their town for centuries. In addition to its wildly successful (and novel) weekly release strategy, the film is also being discussed in terms of its queerness, and how the identities of its main characters subvert or call attention to various horror tropes. 

Directed by Leigh Janiak, the first film in the trilogy (1994) follows several teens in the 1990s – most notably Deena and Sam, who are (ex) girlfriends – as they try to break their town’s curse and uncover the legend of alleged witch Sarah Fier. When Sam gets possessed near the end of the movie, Deena has to learn more about the curse in order to save her, which leads to the second film (1978) and the third (1666), in which Deena inhabits the body of Sarah Fier in order to discover the origins of the curse. Deena and Sam both survive (as does Deena’s brother), and their survival is notable in a genre that historically only leaves one character alive at the end, and definitely does not spare queer or black characters. Looking at the history of queer horror, though, might help us better understand where Fear Street fits in the lineage of this genre. 

The history of queer horror, as it turns out, goes back to the very early days of cinema. The origins of the horror genre, however, can be traced back to a number of influential works of literature. Perhaps surprisingly, there were a number of examples of horror in the 1800s with particularly queer undertones (or overtones, as it were). Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) was one of the earliest works of vampire fiction, and its fairly explicit lesbianism would also inspire the subgenre of lesbian vampires in the next century, as well as several adaptations (most notably the popular Canadian web series of the same name). Mary Shelley’s (who was queer herself) Frankenstein (1817) has also inspired queer readings, as has Bram Stoker’s (also queer) Dracula (1897).

Marguerite Churchill (left) and Gloria Holden (right) in Dracula’s Daughter.

Works such as these heavily influenced early cinema, with queerness – albeit in monstrous forms – being present from the very beginning of horror as a cinematic genre. Films such as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed by a gay director and starring a gay actor (in which the titular bride only appears on-screen for less than 3 minutes), and Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which follows a vampire Countess who kidnaps a psychiatrist’s wife, are examples of this visible queerness. (Dracula’s Daughter in fact got in trouble with the production code¹ for being too gay). 1940’s Rebecca (my personal favorite Hitchcock) is another great example of queer monstrosity from this time, though in an admittedly more human form. Writer and director Ross Tipograph calls this idea of queer monstrosity “homo-as-horror,” and, as we’ll see, it will continue to reign supreme in cinema for the next several decades. 

In the 1950s, spurred on by Mccarthyism and the country’s atomic fears, these (queer) monsters became even more deranged, as strange abominations like Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) emerged. In the 1960s, owing to the demise of the production code, films like The Haunting (1963), which featured an actual lesbian character, began to appear. (The beginning of the new decade also saw Hitchock’s Psycho (1960), an early example of the monstrous man-in-a-dress trope). 

In the 1970s, a classic horror trope emerged – lesbian vampires. The decade saw the release of films like The Vampire Lovers (1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1971), and Daughters of Darkness (1971), which stars acclaimed French actress Delphine Seyrig. This trope continued into the 1980s (and beyond), with the release of the vampire flick The Hunger, starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon, in 1983. The lesbian vampire was a perfect vessel for men’s fears (and desires) about women and about lesbians – their monstrous sexuality was both frightening and arousing.

The Vampire Lovers.

Though it emerged in the 1970s with the likes of directors such as Wes Craven, the 1980s were the height of the slasher flick, a genre that Fear Street places itself squarely within. Though slashers were primarily blood, guts, and final girls, there were some queer elements to these films, such as Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), whose protagonist Jesse “is commonly identified as a repressed gay teen.” Notably, the AIDS crisis also emerged as the slasher film was growing in popularity, which only strengthened the ascendancy of the monstrous queer in horror cinema. If it wasn’t clear in these films before, it was now: if you have sex, you will die. 

The 1990s saw the emergence of the New Queer Cinema movement, as well as a new crop of psychotic lesbians (1994’s Heavenly Creatures), murderous transsexuals (1991’s Silence of the Lambs), and queer vampires (1994’s Interview With a Vampire). In the 2000s, things started to get slightly brighter for queer horror fans, with the new century seeing the release of films like the queer cult-classic Jennifer’s Body (2009), and All Cheerleaders Die (2013), which follows man-eating lesbian zombies. 

Over the last several years there has been something of a lesbian and queer horror renaissance, with films like Thelma (2017), Raw (2016), Personal Shopper (2016), Neon Demon (2016), and What Keeps You Alive (2018) often cited as examples of this new trend. Most recently, Mike Flannigan’s Netflix anthology horror series The Haunting of Hill House (which follows the same story as the 1963 film) and The Haunting of Bly Manor have captured fans with their dynamic lesbian characters and queer love stories. 

Kaya Wilkins (left) and Eili Harboe (right) in Thelma.

Though the history of queer horror is not all bad – frankly, I find deranged queers to be quite enthralling in many circumstances – queerness in horror hasn’t always been represented in the most inspiring fashion, nor have queer people always been able to define these stories for themselves. As Michael Lewis Kennedy puts it in The Brag, “queerness has played a huge role in the horror tradition, but it’s mostly been at the expense of queer people.” Fear Street’s central premise – that the queers survive and the outcasts aren’t monsters after all – then stands as a rebuttal to these classic horror tropes.

Speaking with The Wrap, director Leigh Janiak contends that the queerness and the “otherness” of the characters is in fact central to the plot and the curse on the town. “We basically created a mythology around this idea that everyone in Shadyside feels other for some reason,” Janiak says. “And because of that, we were able to give our characters a personality, an arc, and backstory that usually isn’t given to protagonists in horror movies.” Our main character, Deena, is black and gay, and is constantly pushing up against the confines of her small town of Shadyside. In 1978 we get to know Ziggy and her sister Cindy who are still dealing with the economic fallout of their father leaving, and in 1666 we learn that Sarah Fier wasn’t a witch at all but instead lied and said she was in order to save her girlfriend. 

Fear Street consciously upends various horror tropes, many of which have been specifically harmful to women and people of color. For starters, the trilogy puts a unique spin on the final girl trope. Though the term was initially coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Woman, and Chain Saws, it has been seen in films at least since the 1970s, with early examples found in The Last House on the Left (1972), Black Christmas (1974), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). As Clover puts it, ​​“She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and her own peril; who is cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified.”

One of horror’s most iconic final girls – Sally (Marilyn Burns) in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Especially during the 1970s and 1980s, the final girl was almost always white and virginal. This trope became so common that never having sex was listed as one of the “rules” for surviving a horror movie in Wes Craven’s meta-horror series Scream. Wes Craven was in fact one of the original architects of the slasher genre, and in the Scream films consciously played with the tropes – such as the final girl – that he himself helped create. (Fear Street actually explicitly references Scream in 1994, with Maya Hawke pulling a Drew Barrymore and dying right at the beginning).

In Fear Street, it is only the queer and black characters (who do have sex, by the way), that survive. This, again, is a subversion of the genre, and a departure from R.L. Stine’s own work, which, in its original form, was almost entirely white and straight. Importantly, the final girl(s) is meant to be the relatable character, the one that serves as the audience’s window into the terror on-screen and averts our attention away from the perspective of the killer. Having the central pathos and driving force of the narrative be a lesbian love story is significant for this reason, as the audience is directed to identify with their fear (and love) as the curse trudges on. 

Our final girl(s). Deena (Kiana Madeira, left) and Sam (Oliva Scott Welch, right) in Fear Street Part Three: 1666

Moreover, the monsters in Fear Street, as it turns out, are not actually monsters. Sarah Fier, long considered the town witch and the reason Shadyside is forever cursed, was actually just a queer teenager who was persecuted in what was then a literal witch hunt. (As it turns out, the person who actually cursed the town was a white man looking to preserve power for himself and his descendants). Like slasher flicks and monster movies from the past, otherness is the central theme of the film, but instead of being the thing that needs to be stamped out, it is instead what is necessary for survival. In order to stop the curse, Deena must go back in time to understand what really happened in 1666, and in order to do so, she literally embodies Sarah Fier (while Sam embodies Sarah’s girlfriend), implicitly connecting her otherness to that of Sarah’s. Though it is not said explicitly, it is implied that Deena’s queerness somehow connects her to Sarah Fier, and perhaps that she was the only person who could discover the truth in this way.

This connection also ties to another function of queerness in horror, and that is the function of queer time. Scholar Melody Cooper theorizes that horror as a genre queers time because of the way it troubles binaries between dead and alive, victim and perpetrator. In this sense, vampires, ghosts, and demons are particularly queer (as are, in many cases, witches). The idea of queer time was first theorized by scholar Jack Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place. Predicated on the idea of “no future” – a temporality that emerged during the AIDS crisis, which, as we’ve learned, also played into the violence of slasher films – queer time emphasizes the “here and now,” while also eschewing “the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” in its nonnormative orientation. 

Deena as Sarah Fier in 1666.

In Fear Street, our protagonists are on the outside, looking in, stuck in a perpetual curse that only they can break. The monotony of life in Shadyside – the expectation that you will stay there, settle down and have kids just like your parents – is implicitly part of this curse, and part of the reason our heroes feel they are unable to escape. By breaking the curse and its perpetual reproduction of both terror and sameness, Deena and Sam are able to expand the very possibilities of living. Rather than reveling in the freedom of having “no future,” they instead expand the boundaries of futurity. 

And, indeed, one of the reasons they are able to do this is because they disrupt linear time itself when Deena inhabits the body of Sarah Fier. Normative time, and normativity in general, must always maintain something outside itself in order to exist. This something is what we call the abject². Monsters – which are also often coded as queer – represent the abject. The abject is what one rejects in order to define one’s sense of self, and thus those that are abject(ed) are always on the outside, looking in. It is thus Deena’s abjection (read: her outsider-ness) that allows her to connect with Sarah in this way, disrupting linear time and stopping the curse in the process. 

With all of this history in mind, Fear Street is a compelling example of how queer horror can look and feel, particularly when you consider the impressive cultural literacy of many of today’s horror fans and how it’s been perceived by those with a deep knowledge of the genre. Rather than discounting how queerness has emerged in horror in the past, we can instead imagine a lineage of queer horror, full of starts, stops, disruptions, and subversions. By toying with predictable notions of time, of villainy, and of heroism, Fear Street illustrates one such subversion that is both invigorating for queer horror fans and decidedly entertaining for everyone else. And the lesbians live. 

1. The Production Code – also known as the Hays Code for its architect William Hays – was a system of self-censorship in Hollywood that was enforced from 1934 to 1968. The code mandated what could and could not be shown in films, with its main concern being the appearance of morality. This meant that explicit sexuality, deviance (which included homosexuality), or villainy without punishment was strictly prohibited. (You can read some of the code here).

2. For more on abject theory, see Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), by Julie Kristeva.