Fear Street Part 2: 1978 Ending & C. Berman Twist Explained

Camp Nightwing’s nightmare may be over at the end of Fear Street Part 2: 1978, but Deena still has to witness the full truth about Sarah Fier and the curse she put on Shadyside. The middle chapter of the Fear Street trilogy serves as both a prequel and a sequel to Fear Street Part 1: 1994, as Deena and Josh turn to C. Berman, a survivor of the 1978 Camp Nightwing massacre, for answers that could free Sam from her violent possession.

After Deena and Josh rather rudely break into C. Berman’s house and manage to transfer a tied-up Sam to her bathroom, they sit down to hear the full story of Berman’s own encounter with the witch. Camp Nightwing used to exist on the grounds of the Shadyside Mall, which was built after the 1978 massacre in a (failed) attempt to bury the bloody past. The camp was attended by children from both Shadyside and its neighboring town Sunnyvale, which is as wealthy and prosperous as Shadyside is riddled with bad luck, poverty and tragedy.

C. Berman ultimately escapes Camp Nightwing with her life at the end of Fear Street Part 2: 1978, but her sister and their Shadyside friends aren’t so lucky. Here are the biggest reveals and lingering questions of the movie’s ending, and how they set up the final pieces of the puzzle in Fear Street Part 3: 1666.

Why Tommy Slater Didn’t Kill The Sunnyvale Campers

Fear Street Part 2: 1978‘s Camp Nightwing story opens with Ziggy Berman fleeing a group of Sunnyvale bullies led by Sheila, who orders her minions to string Ziggy up from the hanging tree and then burns her arm with a lighter. Sheila is easy to hate, but unlike the bullies in the 1970s horror classic Carrie, she doesn’t pay for her cruel ways with her life (though she does get a bucket of bugs upended on her head). Sheila, Kurt, and the rest of the Sunnyvale campers escape Camp Nightwing with their lives because, for a reason that has yet to be made clear, Sarah Fier isn’t interesting in exacting revenge on the people of Sunnyvale.

Alice and Cindy’s investigation reveals that Shadyside and Sunnyvale were once a single colonial settlement called Union. After Sarah Fier was hanged as a witch in 1666, Union split into two towns that had very different fortunes. The Goode family ended up on the Sunnyvale side, and in the 1994 setting Nick Goode is the local sheriff and his brother, Will Goode, is the mayor. The Goode family is very wealthy, and was responsible for building the Shadyside Mall on the old camp grounds. An ancestor of the Goodes, Solomon Goode, is set to play a pivotal role in Fear Street Part 3: 1666, and the final chapter of the trilogy can be expected to explain why Sunnyvale was able to escape the Shadyside curse.

Satan’s Stone & Sarah Fier’s Hand

Fear Street Part 1 sketched out the rough details of Sarah Fier’s curse: before she was hanged by the townspeople, she was able to cheat death by cutting off her hand. Fear Street Part 2: 1978 delves deeper into the story, revealing that Sarah cut off her hand on “Satan’s Stone,” scarring the land beneath it with the witch’s mark. After discovering Sarah Fier’s old cottage in the woods, Cindy, Alice, Arnie and Tommy descend into the cellar to find the ritual chamber that was shown at the end of Fear Street Part 1, with the witch’s mark carved into the floor and the names of Sarah Fier’s killers – including Tommy – carved into the wall.

At first it appears that the mark left upon the land is the carving on the floor, but after being chased into a tunnel by the now-murderous Tommy, Cindy and Alice realize that the true witch’s mark manifested as a network of tunnels that span the entire camp grounds. At the heart of this mark is an unpleasant pulsating mass of flesh, which is where Sarah Fier’s undead henchmen emerge from. Basically, Shadyside is sitting on a Hellmouth.

When Alice touches the unholy mound of flesh, the dark shape of another handprint can be seen beside her own hand, indicating that this is the true “Satan’s stone” that Sarah Fier placed her hand on before she cut it off. The skeletal remains of Sarah’s hand are still hidden in the tunnels of the witch’s mark, and when Alice realizes that Sarah’s body is what causes the mysterious red moss to grow, she is able to dig the hand out of where the red moss is thickest. Knowing that the rest of Sarah’s body was buried underneath the hanging tree, Ziggy and Cindy believe they can finally break the curse by reuniting Sarah’s body with her hand – but there’s a problem.

Who Moved Sarah Fier’s Body?

The lack of red moss growing around the base of the hanging tree should have been a warning sign to Ziggy and Cindy that although Sarah Fier’s body was once buried there, it isn’t any more. With the killers closing in, the Berman sisters instead dig up a rock with the words “The wytch forever lives” carved into it. 16 years later, Sam stumbles across the bones of Sarah Fier in a bed of red moss out in the woods. So who moved Sarah’s body, and why?

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 already hinted that Sarah Fier has a living follower in the present day, who is helping her maintain her grip on Shadyside. After Sam managed to cheat the killers with her temporary death, the movie showed someone in the basement of Sarah Fier’s house performing the ritual for Sam’s possession. This same person could have moved her body from its original resting place in order to stymie any efforts to reunite the body with the hand and end Sarah Fier’s evil influence once and for all.

This mystery could be connected to the unanswered question of why Sunnyvale has escaped the curse. In Fear Street Part 2: 1978, Nick Goode feels weighed down by the responsibility of carrying on his father’s legacy – as the chief of police, but also potentially in other ways. Perhaps members of the Goode family offer their services to the undead Sarah Fier in exchange for being spared from her curse. Or perhaps Sarah, like Deena, was persecuted because of a forbidden love affair, and it was her lover who moved her body after her death. The spelling of “wytch” and the undisturbed grass beneath the hanging tree both indicate that whoever left the stone in Sarah Fier’s grave did so a very, very long time ago.

C. Berman’s Identity & How She Escaped The Witch

As revealed in Fear Street Part 1, C. Berman saw the witch and lived to tell the tale in 1978 because of a loophole in Sarah Fier’s curse. When an unlucky mortal attracts the wrath of the witch, she will take possession of a Shadysider and send them on a killing spree, keeping the unlucky henchman enslaved even after their death. However, as the poem says, Sarah Fier will “follow you until you’re dead” – meaning that once a person dies, they cease to be a target and Sarah’s undead henchmen will return to the grave. Ziggy and Cindy are the last two Shadysiders left in the camp, and they die more or less simultaneously: Ziggy is stabbed to death by the Milkman, and Cindy gets axed to death by Tommy Slater. After the killers retreat, Nick Goode arrives on the scene in time to revive Ziggy with CPR and give her a second chance at life.

C. Berman’s first initial led Deena and Josh (and the audience) to believe that Cindy was the Berman sister who survived the Camp Nightwing massacre. However, the ending of Fear Street Part 2: 1978 reveals that Ziggy’s real name is Christine, and she is the C. Berman who escaped Sarah Fier and went on to live a miserable, paranoid existence in terror of the day that the witch would return for her. With a possessed Sam now inside her house, that day may have arrived.

Fear Street Part 2’s Final Scene & Part 3 Set-Up

With a whole other movie left to go, it’s not surprising that Sarah Fier’s curse isn’t immediately broken when Deena reunites the severed hand with the rest of the witch’s remains. Instead, Deena wakes up to find herself in 1666, witnessing events through Sarah Fier’s eyes. Just as Ziggy Berman’s story was the framing device for Fear Street Part 2: 1978, Deena’s accidental jump into the past has set the stage for Sarah’s story to finally be told in Fear Street Part 3: 1666. It could even be the case that Sarah wanted her hand to be found and reunited with her body, so that she would have an opportunity to reveal her own version of events.

There may be more to it than simply telling a story, though. Parts of the local legend about Sarah Fier have already proven to be misleading; temporarily killing Sam didn’t stop Sarah from following her, so exorcising Sarah probably won’t be as simple as reuniting her hand with her body. If Sarah Fier or her followers helped to shape the lore of the witch that all Shadysiders grow up knowing, then Sarah could have manipulated events to make Deena think she was defeating the witch, when actually she was playing right into her hands (so to speak). Rather than getting rid of Sarah permanently, Deena may have accidentally invited the witch into her own body so that she can live again in the 21st century. Whatever the truth is, it will finally be resolved next week with the release of Fear Street Part 3: 1666.

About The Author

Hannah Shaw-Williams
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Hannah has been with Screen Rant since 2013, covering news, features, movie premieres, Comic-Con and more! You can follow her on Twitter @HSW3K

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