"FEAR STREET EVENTUALLY ADMITS ITS CARRIE WHITE FIXATION", ACCORDING TO DEN OF GEEK REVIEW, & OTHERS
Netflix is in the middle of releasing its Fear Street trilogy of horror films. Wildly spinning off from the book series of the same name by R. L. Stine, each film is directed and co-written by Leigh Janiak. After premiering Fear Street Part One: 1994 last week, yesterday saw the premiere of Fear Street Part Two: 1978. Set just two years, then, after Brian De Palma's Carrie was released in theaters, Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is said to have some very direct connection to De Palma's film and Stephen King's novel:
As with Fear Street Part 1 before it, 1978 wears its influences on its sleeves. The previous film was set in 1994 and opened with the biggest star in the cast, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke, getting viciously slaughtered, a la Drew Barrymore in Scream. By contrast, Fear Street Part Two pulls from slower burning horror movies.When we properly begin the film in its ’78 setting, we meet Sadie Sink’s Ziggy Berman, who is being tortured at the hanging tree by her summer camp’s resident mean girls. This plays like it’s straight out of Carrie, both the Stephen King novel published in 1974 and Brian De Palma’s zeitgeist-shattering adaptation from 1976.
Fear Street eventually admits its Carrie White fixation, even having Ziggy reverse engineer the famed “pig blood” sequence from that movie to get back at her Queen Bee tormenter. The new movie also references a few of the tracking shots from the actual slasher movie landmark of 1978, Halloween. But when everything’s said and done, Fear Street Part Two is about the Friday the 13th of it all.
Casey Chong, The Cinemaholic
In keeping with the spirit of ‘Friday the 13th’ and its like-minded genre films, Janiak doesn’t forget to throw in some obligatory sex/nude scenes in between. And while ‘Fear Street Part Two: 1978’ may have primarily devoted to the aforementioned summer-camp slasher subgenre, there’s a scene directly referenced from the iconic scene of Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’.
Mekado Murphy, New York Times
10 Influences That Explain Why ‘Fear Street’ Seems Familiar
‘Carrie’In the 1978 installment, the bloody prom prank from Stephen King’s novel (and subsequent Brian De Palma film) factors into the plot with the ridiculed-but-resilient Ziggy Berman (Sadie Sink), who seeks revenge on those who have wronged her. But in “Fear Street,” pig’s blood is replaced with a much more squirm-inducing alternative. Nonetheless, Ziggy harbors Carrie qualities, as an outsider who frequently faces the derision of other campers and constructs ways to fight back. She doesn’t have to turn up the revenge quite to Carrie levels, though. The killer on the rampage can do that.