Fear Street Part Two: 1978 ENDING EXPLAINED

Netflix's Fear Street Trilogy continues today with Fear Street Part Two: 1978, which takes place 16 years before the first installment, while expanding upon the story and mythology established in Part One. This time, we travel back to the ‘70s to an unapologetic recreation of Friday 13th's Camp Crystal Lake, known as Camp Nightwing, located in the dark and mysterious town of Shadyside. Here, counselors are running a busy summer camp when strange occurrences begin to take shape. And by strange, we do of course mean extremely violent and supernatural.

But, just like Friday 13th: The Final Chapter, this isn't the final chapter in the Fear Street series, with a threequel, entitled Fear Street Part Three: 1666, streaming next week on July 16, as part of Netflix's weekly movie releases throughout 2021.

Check out the Trilogy trailer:

Warning: The following contains spoilers from Fear Street: Part Two 1978. If you haven't already seen it, watch it and come back here. But if you're happy to keep reading…

After a "Previously on…", Fear Street Part Two: 1978 kicks off with a very non-1978 opener, picking up where things were left in the first movie, with characters Deena (Kiana Madeira) and Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.) dealing with the now-possessed Sam (Olivia Welch), Deena's girlfriend, who's bound in the trunk. A news report confirms that the now-dead Simon and Kate have since been blamed for the 1994 murders. They visit Christine Berman (Gillian Jacobs), the sole survivor of the Camp Nightwing Massacre, in the hope that she can help them, having died herself only to be brought back to life moments later, just like Sam was. Christine tells the story of that fateful night in 1978, and so we jump back in time and visit the summer camp that's about as appropriately named as the town it's in, where both Shadysiders and Sunnyvalers are spending their summer.

We meet Christine in child-form, known as "Ziggy" (which, oddly, is later treated as a twist in a third-act revelation), played by Sadie Sink of Stranger Things-fame, who is bullied by a group of fellow campers from Sunnyvale – Shadyside's not-so-evil neighboring town. We also meet her friend Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland), who we know turns out to be the Sheriff in Part One: 1994, and her older sister, Cindy, and her boyfriend, Thomas Slater, both of whom are counselors. Things begin to take a weird turn when the camp nurse, the mother of one of Shadyside's deceased killers (the "singing girl" ), attacks Cindy and her boyfriend Thomas, having seemingly lost her mind.

Cindy and Thomas meet up with their friends Alice and her boyfriend, and together discover a series of tunnels beneath camp, which they believe belong to the witch Sarah Fier, who was burned in 1666. When Cindy and Alice discover a strange symbol on the floor, and a runestone – the same one we saw at the end of the previous film - that depicts the names of all of Shadyside's past killers, while also showing the name "Thomas Slater", Thomas becomes possessed, and brutally murders Alice's boyfriend, before pursuing Cindy and Alice into the seemingly endless tunnels, where they become lost and trapped.

Meanwhile, Ziggy continues to be at the receiving end of Sunnyvale's bullies but grows close with Nick. Soon, after failing to catch Cindy and Alice, Thomas emerges from the tunnels and begins slaughtering the inhabitants of Camp Nightwing – both campers and counselors - in a series of grizzly murders that set this film apart from Part One in terms of gore. There's also a ton of ‘70s music, including Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Feat the Reaper" – something of a signature track when it comes to slasher movies – and more film references than you can find in your average blockbuster legacy sequel. There's The Exorcist, The Shining, Carrie, Salem's Lot, and, of course, Friday 13th.

Related: Fear Street Part One: 1994 ENDING EXPLAINED

While future-sheriff Nick rounds up any stragglers to hide them in the main building, down in the tunnels, Cindy and Alice discover a strange, grotesque organic mound, which Alice decides to touch, leading her to experience a brief episode of horrifying visions of the dead in the tunnels. Eventually, the two girls find a way into the camp's outhouse, where Ziggy is fighting with bully Sheila. Meanwhile, the strange blob in the tunnels gives birth to a faceless demonic creature, which crawls away.

When Cindy and Alice make it out of the tunnels, Alice reveals that she has discovered Sarah Fier's "lost hand", but is brutally killed moments later by Thomas, who is now wearing a potato sack on his head in a very on-the-nose reference to Friday 13th Part II. That's when all the killers of old re-emerge from their Shadyside graves – just like in Part One – and pursue Ziggy and Cindy, who realize that the dead are alive because Ziggy bled on Sarah Fier's hand just moments before, thus "disturbing" her corpse, just like Sam does in 1994.

In a frenzied bloodbath, while trying to bury Fier's hand – during which they discover a rock with the engraving "The Witch Forever Lives" - the two sisters are brutally slain. However, Nick resuscitates Ziggy, and naturally, any supernatural involvement is ignored by the authorities, and Thomas Slater is considered nothing more than yet another Shadysider who "snapped". And so we return to 1994, reuniting with Deena, Josh, Sam, and Catherine "Ziggy" Berman, who says her sister "sacrificed herself for nothing", that the witch's curse lives on. Ziggy explains that there's no way to end Sarah Fier's curse, and tells Deena and Josh that they must leave Shadyville.

But Deena reveals to Ziggy that they found Sarah Fier's body on the roadside and that the witch sent the killers after them because they found it, that it must be the key to ending the curse. Deena and Josh retrieve the hand and set about reuniting it with the body, but Deena starts to experience horrifying visions, and suddenly finds herself in the town of Union in 1666, the original settlement that would ultimately become Shadyville and Sunnyvale. When someone calls out the name Sarah Fier, we see a "To Be Continued…", followed by the trailer for Part Three, which reveals that Deena isn't the only familiar face to be suddenly occupying a time that couldn't be any further from the ‘70s or ‘90s if it tried…

Check out the trailer for Fear Street Part Three: 1666:

How will Deena reunite Sarah Fier's hand with the body now that she's no longer in 1994? What was the weird blob-thing in the tunnels that vomited a Demogorgon-like creature? Was it the resurrected killers in their pre-zombie phase, or something else entirely? Will there be yet another Stranger Things actor in the third movie? And are the familiar faces in the trailer for Part Three the same people we've already met, doomed to repeat their tortured lives in some ill-fated paradox at the hands of the seemingly unbeatable witch Sarah Fier? All will be revealed in Fear Street Part Three: 1666.

The trilogy concludes with Fear Street Part Three: 1666, which streams on Netflix on July 16.