The first film in the Netflix horror ‘Fear Street’ trilogy featured one of the most gruesome death scenes in the climactic battle. Without giving away too many spoilers, let’s say it involved one of the victims getting killed after being shoved in a bread slicer.
‘Fear Street 1994’ director Leigh Janiak broke down this scene in an interview with Collider where he discussed how he could make it seem more realistic.
“I don’t remember the genesis of it,” he said. “I remember that we were very excited about having our climax of the 90s take place in a grocery store. Part of the fun of the 90s movie for me was being able to kind of take suburbia and take these places that are really familiar and tear them apart and destroy them, so I loved the idea of being able to be in the grocery store. We kind of went through this whole thing of, the characters have different areas of the store that they’re in and they’re all trying to protect Sam, and Kate ended up in the bakery.”
He continued, “I have these weird things that I like, like I like the idea of cake mixing with blood. I just think it’s a cool image and so at one point we just started riffing on what could happen in that sequence and then we came up with the bread slicer. It was one of those things that when you’re reading it, it’s horrible, but then you get closer to doing it and you’re like, ‘Wait, this is actually crazy,’ and, ‘How are we gonna do this?’”
Apparently, several members of the crew doubted that this possible, so they tested the effect with a watermelon.
“There were all of these conversations with our art department – with Scott [Kuzio], with Sean [Brennan], with Jess [Royal] – being like, ‘I don’t think a human head would really do that.’ They were like getting at me,” Janiak explained. “They were like, ‘I don’t know. This is a little unbelievable.’ And I was like, ‘It’s f****** cool so we’re gonna do it!’ And then they bought a bread slicer. They wanted to prove me wrong so they had this idea that they were gonna throw watermelons through this bread slicer and they were convinced that it wouldn’t work, and the watermelon just went right through.”
He added, “It was a big cheer moment, like we were at the production office and everyone just started clapping and cheering and it was amazing! And so then everyone was sold that this could happen.”
‘Fear Street Part 1: 1994’ is inspired by a series of books by R.L. Stine. The second part of the horror trilogy ‘Fear Street Part 2: 1978’ is set to be released on Netflix on July 9th, 2021.