Why Fear Street Part 1: 1994 Kills [SPOILER] Off So Early

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 pays tribute to Wes Craven’s iconic 1996 slasher Scream by killing off its most recognizable star in the very first scene. The daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, Maya Hawke had her breakout role as Robin in Stranger Things season 3, and also appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood. However, despite being featured significantly in marketing for Fear Street, Hawke’s character Heather doesn’t make it beyond the movie’s first few minutes.

Netflix’s trilogy of horror movies is based on the Fear Street books by R.L. Stine, and is set in the spooky town of Shadyside. For three centuries, Shadyside has suffered under a curse that periodically causes people to go on brutal killing sprees. The local town legend blames this on a witch called Sarah Fier, who was hanged by the people of Shadyside in 1666 but continues to haunt the town and wreak bloody revenge on its citizens.

The latest Shadyside killer wears a Halloween Skull Mask and chases poor book store employee Heather through Shadyside Mall before finally slaughtering her with a knife. Before she dies, Heather receives creepy phone calls and puts up a good fight trying to get away, leading the audience to believe that she just might make it and become Fear Street‘s protagonist and final girl. The opening is an overt homage to the beginning of Scream, in which Drew Barrymore – who by then had been acting for over a decade and was known for her roles in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Doppelganger and Boys on the Side – plays Casey, a teenager who is stalked and murdered by the Ghostface killer. Fear Street director Leigh Janiak previously directed several episodes of MTV’s Scream TV show, and in the press notes for Fear Street she calls the original Scream “one of the most brilliant movies ever made.”

Wes Craven originally planned to cast Drew Barrymore in the role of Sidney Prescott, the protagonist of the Scream movies, but Barrymore instead asked if she could play the character who is killed off in the first 15 minutes of the movie. In a recent interview on First We Feast’s Hot Ones, Barrymore explained:

“In the horror film genre, my biggest pet peeve was that I always knew the main character was going to be slugging through at the end, but was going to creak by and make it. What I wanted to do is to take that comfort zone away… I asked if I could be Casey Becker so that we would establish that rule does not apply in this film.”

Scream‘s shocking opening sequence sent a clear message that no character was safe, though of course it wasn’t the first horror movie to kill off its biggest star. Another of Janiak’s key influences for Fear Street was Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1960 film Psycho famously killed Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, after seemingly setting her up as the movie’s main character. The lesson that Marion Crane, Casey Becker and now Fear Street‘s Heather have taught is that a character doesn’t need to survive the whole movie – or even the movie’s opening scene – to make a memorable impression.

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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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