Fear Street Part 3: 1666 Ending & Secret Villain Explained

Fear Street Part 3: 1666 closes out Netflix’s horror trilogy with the surprising truth about Sarah Fier and a major twist about who the real villain of Shadyside is. Directed by Leigh Janiak and inspired by R.L. Stine’s book series, the Fear Street movies pay homage to iconic horror movies while also delivering a gripping story with more to it than meets the eye.

Deena reunited Sarah Fier’s hand with the rest of her body at the end of Fear Street Part 2: 1978, believing that this would break the curse and release Sam from her murderous possession. Instead, Deena found herself transported back to the year 1666 and living through Sarah Fier’s memories of how Shadyside became cursed. She learns that Sarah was never actually a witch, and that the real culprit was Solomon Goode, who framed Sarah for the spooky goings-on in the town and hanged her for his own crimes. Sarah Fier did unleash a curse when she died, but it was directed at Solomon rather than the town itself.

After Sarah’s story is told, Fear Street Part 3: 1666 becomes Fear Street 1994: Part 2, returning to the present day for a final showdown with Solomon Goode’s present-day heir, Sheriff Nick Goode. Teaming up with Josh, Ziggy and local mall custodian Martin, Deena is determined to save Sam’s soul and stop the Goodes for good. Here’s a breakdown of Fear Street Part 3: 1666‘s ending, the biggest questions, and how the sinister final shot sets up a potential sequel.

Fear Street Part 3’s Villain Twist: Goode Is Evil

Solomon Goode is introduced as a seemingly nice and sympathetic character in Fear Street Part 3: 1666. He moved his family out of Shadyside (which was then called Union) in the hopes of farming land outside of the town. Solomon suffered a run of bad luck, with his crops failing and his wife and child dying, so he looked for a different way to become prosperous: killing the local witch, stealing her spellbook, and summoning the devil. Solomon made a deal with Satan, offering him the soul of Pastor Cyrus Miller in exchange for good fortune. The pastor became the first of Fear Street‘s serial killers, gathering the local children into the church and killing them by cutting out their eyes. Other evil was visited on Union by Solomon’s transaction with the devil: the Fier family’s sow eating her own pigs, Sarah’s dog drowning in the well and poisoning the water, and food rotting and filling with insects.

The Goode family, not the ghost of Sarah Fier, have been responsible for every serial killer to emerge in Shadyside since 1666. Once or twice in every generation, the heir of Solomon Goode returns to the devil’s altar and puts a new name on the wall, sacrificing a soul in exchange for the continued success of the Goode family and the town they founded, Sunnyvale. This unholy trade is responsible not only for all the murders in Shadyside, but also for other problems like poverty, unemployment and general bad luck.

Sarah Fier already had a target on her back in Union after being caught canoodling with her secret girlfriend: the pastor’s daughter, Hannah Miller. Solomon Goode was one of the people who witnessed the two of them together, and he grew jealous due to his own love for Sarah. It was in this rage that he killed Widow Mary, stole the book, and sent the devil after Hannah’s father. When the supernatural happenings started in Union, the townspeople blamed Sarah and (in Fear Street‘s homage to The Crucible) made up false claims about seeing her and Hannah consorting with the devil. As they prepared to hang them both, Sarah confessed to witchcraft in order to save Hannah’s life, claiming that she had clouded Hannah’s mind with her magic but that she had acted alone in worshipping the devil.

What Sarah Fier’s Real Curse Was

The legend about the witch, her missing hand, and Sarah Fier’s curse that was passed down through the centuries was born out of Sarah’s confession, and shaped as a convenient piece of propaganda by the Goode family to create a scapegoat for all of Shadyside’s bad luck. This is why Deena reuniting Sarah’s hand with the rest of her body didn’t break the curse – though it did activate Sarah Fier’s real curse.

It’s implied in Fear Street Part 3: 1666 that Sarah may have had some innate supernatural gifts. These manifest as a kind of white magic, such as when Sarah improbably manages to save the entire litter of piglets, in contrast to the dark magic that kills the piglets. The red moss that grows around Sarah Fier’s remains, seeded by the flower crown that Hannah left on her body after Sarah was reburied, is another manifestation of this magic. And while being hanged by Union’s pitchfork-wielding mob, Sarah lays a curse on Solomon Goode with her final breaths. She curses him with the truth, telling him that both she and the truth will follow him and his descendants down through the centuries, and he will never be rid of her.

It’s this curse that allows the truth to finally come out when Deena reunites Sarah’s hand with her bones. Then, when Nick Goode accidentally touches the throbbing mass of Hell-flesh at the heart of the witch’s mark, he is plagued by visions of all the victims that the Goode family’s evil has claimed – including Sarah Fier. While Nick is disoriented from these visions, Sarah works through Deena to stab him in the eye and kill him, finally breaking the Goode family’s curse and freeing Sarah from her own.

Why Nick Sent The Killers After Sam

One question raised by Fear Street Part 3: 1666‘s reveal is why Sunnyside’s serial killers returned so soon after the last massacre, and why they targeted Sam. The Goodes only need to offer up one or two names to the devil in each generation in order to maintain their good fortune, which is why the serial killers appear once every decade or so. Since the Skull-Face killer only recently completed his own killing spree, the devil should have been satisfied by those deaths for many years.

In his final showdown with Deena, Nick is open about his contempt for her and for all Shadysiders, so he could just have kicked off an extra massacre for the hell of it (no pun intended). However, Sam’s car crash and her accidental contact with Sarah Fier’s grave seem to be what spurred Nick to summon the killers and send them after her. The best explanation for this is that Nick knew about the association between Sarah Fier and nosebleeds from Ziggy’s sighting of the witch in 1978, and grew suspicious of Deena and her friends’ cagey answers at the site of the crash. If he’d been warned about Sarah Fier cursing his family with the truth, Nick would have wanted to make sure that anyone who saw the witch wouldn’t live to tell about it.

Why Killing Nick Broke The Curse (Even Though His Brother Is Still Alive)

When Deena stabs Nick through the eye and kills him, the Goodes’ undead henchmen immediately burst into a cloud of flies. Their names disappear from the walls, implying that they have been freed from their enslavement, and the flesh mound beneath Shadyside Mall (which was once the site of Camp Nightwing, and before that was the original site of the Union settlement) sinks back into the earth. The tunnels disappear and the witch’s mark is erased from the altar – all of which suggests that the curse on Shadyside has been very thoroughly broken. To clinch it, a Sunnyvaler who regards Deena and Sam with a snooty expression when they emerge from the Goode house immediately has his car hit by a garbage truck. Sunnyvale’s good luck has run out.

After Nick is exposed as Shadyside’s real serial killer, his brother claims to have no knowledge of what was going on (rather dubiously, given that the Goode family home is full of stuffed goat heads, black candles and other sinister objects). So, why is the curse broken even though Solomon Goode’s bloodline persists through Mayor Will Goode? According to the terms of Solomon Goode’s original contract with the devil, the responsibility of carrying on the sacrifices is passed from “firstborn to firstborn,” and is apparently nontransferable even if the firstborn son dies. However, that may not prevent the Goodes from making a grab to get their power back.

Who Took The Book In Fear Street 3’s Post-Credits Scene?

Just when it seems like Shadyside’s long nightmare is over, Fear Street Part 3: 1666‘s post-credits scene reveals a mysterious page of hands snatching Solomon Goode’s old spellbook from the altar. With this book, the curse could be started up again, or some other nefarious magic could be inflicted on the people of Shadyside. An obvious suspect for who the hands belong to is Mayor Will Goode, who would have known about the book and how to use it. With the book in his possession, he could make the same deal that Solomon did in 1666 and start the pattern of devil-worship all over again.

Another possibility is Deena. After all, the last time the book changed hands by force was when Widow Mary was murdered by Solomon Goode, and if killing the previous owner transfers possession of the book, then Deena would have inherited it when she killed Nick. However, Deena has little motivation for wanting to tangle with the devil now that her life is finally going well: her dad has a job interview, she can openly be Sam’s girlfriend, and even Josh has found the promise of romance by meeting his AOL chatroom pal in real life. Given all the trouble the book has caused, if Deena took it then it would probably be with the intention of destroying it or keeping it out of the wrong hands, rather than actually using it.

For now, the post-credits scene is an open-ended hint that Fear Street could continue in Part 4. If that happens, then the person who takes the book could be a brand new character who won’t be introduced until the sequel.

The Real Meaning of Fear Street Part 3’s Ending

All three movies in the Fear Street trilogy have an undercurrent of class struggles, epitomized by the feud between Sunnyvale and Shadyside. The names of the two towns are a hint that Sunnyvale is only succeeding at the expensive of Shadyside: after all, shadows are created by the sun. But while a devil-worshipping family and an evil spell may be responsible for Shadyside’s misfortune, the subtext of the Fear Street movies is that generational wealth is its own kind of unnatural good luck, while systemic poverty sets people up to remain stuck in poverty. Co-writer and director Leigh Janiak elaborates on this theme in the movie’s press notes:

“The project started to come together around this idea of the systemic oppression that permeates culture and tells certain people that you’re ‘other’ and you are never going to win. And I think that’s a common thing to feel growing up, especially for anyone who’s been born into a world they feel like they can’t escape. The Shadysiders are born into this world where their fate has already been determined for them. I loved the idea of having our killers be a kind of representation of systemic rot, but that in the end each of our protagonists win.”

Not only are Shadysiders hounded by constant bad luck, they are crucially also blamed for their own misfortune. News reports about the violence in the town lament that Shadysiders seem to have no interest in improving themselves. The chosen scapegoat for the curse is Sarah Fier, a person who was downtrodden in her own time and is eventually memorialized as the “First Shadysider.” Though they have an old feud with the people of Sunnyvale, Shadysiders were ultimately tricked into directing the blame for their misfortune at one of their own, so that they wouldn’t realize the people responsible for their misery were actually over in Sunnyvale.

The relationship between Sunnyvale and Shadyside illustrates the idea that an over-abundance of wealth for one person comes at the expense of poverty for another. It’s a timely theme given the growing problem of income inequality in the United States, with Time reporting that since 1975 there has been a wealth transfer of $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Just as the poorest and most disadvantaged people in society are often scapegoated for being the cause of their own misery and other people’s, Shadysiders are told it’s their own fault that they haven’t succeeded in the same way that Sunnyvale has.

As Janiak points out, the Fear Street trilogy ultimately ends on a hopeful note as Deena and her friends identify the real source of their misfortune and strike out against the “systemic rot” at the heart of Sunnyvale and Shadyside. But if the spellbook has ended up in the wrong hands, they’ll need to stay on their guard if they want to protect their town from further evil.

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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