Metacritic reviews

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is a film rich with character, world-building, Easter eggs, and scares. Horror fans will be grinning over a visual allusion, then be pulled to the edge of their seat by this slaughter-packed adventure, then catch themselves screaming at a harrowingly portrayed murder.

There’s real, seat-edge fun to be had here, the sort of fun that’s too often missing from modern horror.

Fear Street is like a big soup pot full of everything – there are shades of Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Stephen King’s It, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and more. Watching Fear Street brings back memories of wandering around musty video stores and browsing the HORROR section for the most lurid VHS box art you can find. There was something sacred about that experience, like going to church.

1994 plays more like television than a theatrical film. The more limited scope isn’t bothersome, though, because you can only watch it on your TV, after all, and two more films/episodes are soon on the way.

While Janiak is able to easily tick off the hallmarks of the genre, and perhaps convince those actually alive in the nineties that the entire decade must have been backlit in aggressive neon, her film doesn’t quite scream (or Scream) out for two more films’ worth of context.

“Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.

The dialogue can be clunky and easy to guess in advance, and there’s an unfortunate reliance on jump scares. The thing to remember is this is all part of a larger story, and without spoiling anything, that story does get significantly more interesting.

If the Day-Glo antics of Fear Street Part 1: 1994 are as tonally insecure as its teenage characters and a bit too broad to get under your skin, rest assured that this overstuffed slasher cuts much deeper when it’s contextualized as the latest chapter of an American horror story that’s been in the telling for more than 300 years.

1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is a perfectly fine throwback slasher horror movie, but is weighed down by setting up the rest of Netflix's trilogy.