Netflix’s adaptation of RL Stein’s book series Fear Street has been a fun trilogy of overt horror homage filtered through a Scooby-Doo filter. Now, it’s over – or has it just begun? The final installment, after a failed attempted by the series’ heroine Deena Johnson (Kiana Madeira) at the end of the second movie to reunite the appendages of supposed witch Sarah Fier, returns us to 1666, to the earliest days of the Shadyside curse. Here’s what happened, who it happened to, and why.
Surprising basically nobody, Sarah Fier was never actually a witch. Instead, she was a victim of Puritanical zealotry and prejudice after a secret love affair with Hannah Miller (Olivia Scott Welch) earned her the ire of Solomon Goode (Ashley Zukerman), a surname you’ll be familiar with since it keeps popping up again and again. Now, we know why. Solomon, a potential suitor of Sarah’s who doesn’t take rejection well, had made a deal with the Devil – one soul, carved into stone and offered up for demonic possession, in exchange for eternal Goode fortune. All the serial killers – beginning with a pastor who blinded children and ending with Ryan Torres in a ‘90s mall – have been offerings from the latest descendent of the Goode family, normal, innocent people turned bloodthirsty so the Devil can drink up the carnage they leave behind.
Sarah was a patsy, essentially, someone to pin the town’s darkness on. Since then, the Goodes and Sunnyvale have been enjoying the prosperity of the sacrifices. Once Deena learns all this in the first half of Fear Street: Part Three and subsequently returns to the ‘90s, she’s able to hatch a plan. Sheriff Goode is the latest Big Bad, and his latest vessel is Deena’s girlfriend, Sam. It’s an apt choice since he needs to kill Deena to ensure that the secret of what happened to Sarah Fier – and what the Goode family has been up to – remains buried. All the serial killers are out for Deena’s blood, which Deena, Josh, Ziggy, and Martin see as an opportunity to fight back.
The scheme goes thusly. Everyone sneaks into the Shadyside mall, which is built atop Camp Nightwing which was itself built atop the Goode family’s sacrificial subterranean den, and then uses a concoction of paint and Deena’s blood to create luring trails around the mall and into various department stores, where they can lock up the serial killers and leave Goode himself vulnerable. It doesn’t go as smoothly as this, obviously, but that’s all part of the fun. Eventually, Deena is able to follow Goode to the beating heart beneath the mall, stab it, and allow the spirit of Sarah Fier to stab him, thus breaking the curse.
The journey to get here, though, is full of close calls, and one, in particular, stands out as interesting, since Deena is able to break Satan’s grip on Sam through the sheer power of true love. It’s probably no coincidence that Kiana Madeira and Olivia Scott Welch also played Sarah Fier and Hannah in this film; their lesbian love story has rippled through the ages. Even in what is quite obviously a story about class conflict, the unifying force of love trumps all.
But that isn’t quite the end of Fear Street: Part Three – 1666. With Goode dead, Deena and Sam both okay, and the curse lifted, it seems like a happy ending… at least until we see a pair of hands snatch Solomon Goode’s spellbook from the catacombs.
