If it looks like nostalgia, and it feels like nostalgia, it must be nostalgia. When I saw that the Fear Street trilogy (dir. Leigh Janiak) was releasing on Netflix on Friday, 2 July, it sparked a throwback to the days spent checking the books out of my school library. The RL Stine series — Fear Street was the grown-up version of Goosebumps, targeted at teenagers — felt more adult than Nancy Drew mysteries and Hardy Boys cases, a spookier River Heights High that might initiate you into Stephen King's works. Fear Street had adolescent angst and high school drama, but also supernatural horror that delivered genuine thrills.

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 — streaming now — stays true to that ethos. Clocking in at an hour and 45 minutes, FS94 begins with the tale of two cities, Sunnyvale and Shadyside. The names are indicative of the towns’ fates: Sunnyvale is prosperous and flourishing, Shadyside is on the skids and going nowhere particularly good. This isn’t just a simple case of economics or bad planning or even luck; Shadyside is cursed, courtesy a long-dead witch called Sarah Frier. Shadyside’s denizens may scoff at or believe the myth, but the fact remains that macabre events are a constant in the town: murder sprees, mutilations, normal people “snapping” and attacking their friends and loved ones.

Part One sets the tone with a sequence typical of ‘90s slasher films: a girl (Maya Hawke), among the last workers left for the day at the desolate Shadyside mall, answers a phone. A Scream-type villain — complete with black robe and skeleton mask — attacks her with a knife. She is the killer’s final victim in a bloody rampage that has claimed at least six others. When the local sheriff shoots him dead, the killer is revealed to be a teen who worked at the mall — yet another instance of the Shadyside curse at work.

The story then shifts to the main cast of characters: Deena (Kiana Madeira, chanelling strong Eliza Dushku vibes), a cynical and angry high school student who is nursing a broken heart after splitting up with her girlfriend Sam; Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) has recently moved out of Shadyside and to Sunnyvale — a shift that represents the couple’s diverging outlooks on life as well. There’s Deena’s younger brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr), a nerd who spends his time researching how the town’s curse manifested over the years, exchanging instant messages over AOL, and pining for Deena’s best friend Kathy (Julia Rehwald), a go-getting cheerleader with a side hustle in dealing drugs. There’s also Simon (Fred Hechinger), Deena and Kathy’s easygoing, good-humoured buddy.