WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Fear Street Part 2: 1978, now streaming on Netflix.
The first two installments of the Fear Street trilogy have proved that Shadyside is anything but a fun-filled, relaxing community. Nursery rhymes are filled with stories of witches and demons, mass murders are commonplace and everyone, whether they believe in the witch or not, knows the town is cursed.
But while no one tries to hide that the town is a scary place filled with scary people, but everyone in Shadyside simply ignores a creepy piece of evidence that could help prove the witch’s curse: all of the horrible massacres in Shadyside happen in the same exact place -- in the center of town, near the old hanging tree.
Back in 1666, Sara Fier was hung as a witch on a large tree in the middle of the old Shadyside Settlement. Before she died, however, she cut off her own hand on Satan’s Stone and made a deal with the Devil. As a result, she cheated death and kept her hold over the land, and for the last 300 years, she has periodically returned to take her revenge on the people of Shadyside. It was that same year Cyrus Miller went crazy, murdered several children and cut out their eyes, and it just so happens that those events took place at the old settlement, not far from the old hanging tree.
Flashforward to 1978, and the relics of the past are still there. The town even built Camp Nightwing right beside the hanging tree, over the Witch’s Wall and a short walk from the witch’s house that is somehow been left standing for the past 300 years. After the Camp Nightwing Massacre, the camp was shut down, but it was only a few short years later that the Shadyside Mall was built over top of the old, cursed campgrounds. In fact, they decided to leave the hanging tree standing and build the Mall around it. Then, in 1994, another massacre happened inside of the mall, directly below the limbs of the old tree.
Everything happens in close proximity to the hanging tree, and that makes sense because Sarah Fier cursed the ground around it. However, that still doesn't explain why the residents of Shadyside have ignored that fact for so long. Perhaps the witch’s house was seen as taboo in 1666, and that was why people stayed away from it. Regardless, after the witch was killed and strange things started happening, that building should have been burned to the ground and the tree chopped down.
Years later, ignoring the tree and house still would've been better than building a kids’ summer camp right beside them. Even if people didn’t fully believe that the tree and house were evil, it still seems like a bad idea to build near what could be an old witch’s house and what might've been a cursed hanging tree. And if that wasn’t enough, they decided to build a mall over the old camp and leave the tree standing inside of it, which makes it the center of town and draws people to the site of the camp massacre.
What all of this means is that, even in 1994, the hanging tree and the Witch’s Wall are still in the center of town, not to mention the witch’s hand was buried in the mall the whole time. Curse or no curse, three massacres on the same property might be cause enough to try a different location for the next city project.
Directed and co-written by Leigh Janiak, the Fear Street trilogy stars Sadie Sink, Kiana Madeira, Olivia Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Darrell Britt-Gibson, Ashley Zukerman, Fred Hechinger, Julia Rehwald, Jeremy Ford and Gillian Jacobs. Part One: 1994 and Part Two: 1978 are available now on Netflix. Part Three: 1666 will premiere on July 16.