Woman of the Month: Deena Johnson

Deena Johnson from the Fear Street trilogy

SPOILERS

The best stories are the ones that take you by surprise and the Fear Street trilogy certainly achieved that. Although horror isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, there is something to be said for the genre’s Final Girl trope and how she’s evolved throughout the years, from the virginal distressed damsel who survives long enough for the police to rescue her, to the girl-next-door who grabs the nearest weapon, comes up with an on-the-fly plan of attack, and takes out the serial killer by herself.

Deena falls into the latter category, but along the way the trilogy also has something to say about the old Bury Your Gays trope. We’re now reaching a point where genre-savvy writers are aware of the unpleasant and wearying implications of any LGBTQIA+ characters biting the dust during the course of their respective story, but still not close enough to feel assured of their safety when they appear in horror/slashers films.

So when Deena’s ex, a character initially referred to ambiguously as “Sam”, turns out to be another girl, you’ll be forgiven for assuming that one or the other would be dead by the time the credits roll. And the trilogy certainly takes Deena through the ringer. Believing that Sam is being targeted by a range of supernatural serial killers on account of her disturbing the grave of Sarah Fier, a long-dead witch said to have cursed the town of Shadyside, Deena puts her own life on the line to protect her ex from a grisly end.

Then when Sam is possessed by the witch and attacks Deena, she seeks out answers from the sole survivor of another mass-murder, gaining the tools she needs to disappear into a movie-length flashback sequence to the year 1666 in order to find out the truth of how the curse that plagues their community started in the first place. In an ingenious touch, the actresses for Deena and Sam are also used for their ancestral/spiritual counterparts Sarah and Hannah, in which the Sapphic lovers meet the very fate that their modern equivalents are so desperate to avoid.  

Armed with the truth and some righteous anger, Deena uses the knowledge she’s accumulated to save her love and end the curse once and for all. Talk about a Determinator!

Ultimately it’s a story about how an indomitable teenage lesbian takes on the white male classist patriarchy in order to save her girlfriend’s life... and wins. And obviously, when I put it that way it sounds like the whole thing is going to be a heavy-handed tract on contemporary social issues, in which the message gets in the way of the story – but trust me, if you haven’t seen it already, this trilogy deftly integrates its plot-points across the action in a way I really didn’t expect from a trashy slasher based on pulp horror for teenagers from the nineties.