The Friday the 13th franchise may be gory but it never stepped over the line by killing off kids, which can't be said for Fear Street 1978. This sequel is the second part of Netflix’s slasher trilogy Fear Street. Despite being based on a series of bestselling books by Goosebumps scribe R.L. Stine, the Fear Street movies are R-rated, gory, and not at all suitable for young viewers.
In fact, while the first installment Fear Street 1994 featured some surprising kills, the darker second outing managed to break a long-held, unspoken slasher movie taboo. Set in the idyllic environs of Camp Nightwing, Fear Street 1978 is a classic summer camp slasher in the vein of The Burning or Friday the 13th. However, there is one very big difference between Fear Street 1978 and every installment of the uber-popular horror series starring masked murderer Jason Voorhees.
While the Friday The 13th series rarely followed the bounds of good taste, the franchise did draw the line at having Jason actually murder children. This tradition is thoroughly upended by the Stephen King-referencing slasher Fear Street 1978, which sees its killer Tommy Slater kill numerous children (fortunately all offscreen, although their gruesome remains are briefly glimpsed after the fact). Admittedly, the Friday the 13th movies feature Jason pursuing Tommy Jarvis in The Final Chapter, while the slasher also briefly menaced a cabin of young campers in Friday the 13th: Jason Lives. That said, he never broke that kid-killing taboo despite racking up an impressive body count throughout the series.
Fear Street 1978 further twists the knife (so to speak) by establishing a group of unpleasant, spoiled, bullying teens who appear to be obvious potential victims - only to then have Tommy Slater kill the perfectly pleasant kids. This subversive approach likely has something to do with an unanswered question from Fear Street 1994, which is how the killers in the series choose their victims, with Tommy seeming to ignore campers from Sunnyvale and hunting down kids from Shadyside. Regardless of how much town origin matters to the killer, though, age is not a priority for Tommy when he picks up his ax.
All told, Tommy Slater kills four children during the events of Fear Street 1978, offing a lone “jailer” during the summer camp’s color war before then killing a trio of kids who were “jailed” by their Sunnyvale rivals. Although the deaths aren’t depicted onscreen, it is still an unusually gruesome occurrence that few slasher movies include and more proof that the Fear Street series features some terrifying villains in its trilogy of slasher horrors. Bad as Jason Voorhees can be, even the Camp Crystal Lake killer of Friday the 13th fame can at least say he has never offed a defenseless kid, while Fear Street 1978’s villain Tommy killed four in one movie.