Slasher, rites of passage and adolescence: the liminar Queer subject in Fear Street (Netflix, 2021)

Abstract

Slashers are a subgenre of horror films, full of violence and sex, born in the United States in the 1970s. They star teenagers and triumph, especially, among teenagers. Despite moments of crisis and serious controversy, they are still part of audiovisual fiction today, as illustrated by Fear Street (2021). This paper studies the narrative of this Netflix production to interpret the profound sense of a type of filmmaking often accused of inciting femicide and of being exploitative. That is, of using the forbidden, the lurid and the scandalous to, for a low budget, make a killing at the box office through commercial formulas such as sequels and using dubious aesthetic pretensions. Specifically, slashers are related to the sexual awakening and narrations of the rite of passage to heteronormativity, which, in the case of Fear Street, is questioned from a Queer perspective.