Between 1989 and 1999, YA author R.L. Stine developed several Fear Street offshoots that elaborate on Shadyside’s ominous legacy. The Fear Street Sagas detail the frightening history of the town, an unaware family moves to a doomed address in 99 Fear Street, and Fear Street Seniors chronicles the growing body count of one graduating class. In one of the more popular spin-offs, the Cheerleaders series, the key to saving an imperiled pep squad’s future now lies directly in Shadyside’s past.
In August of 1992, Fear Street readers were introduced to The First Evil, the start of a trilogy of books about Shadyside High’s cursed cheerleaders. The protagonists are sisters Bobbi and Corky Corcoran, who have just moved to the town and want to join the high school’s cheerleading team. Although there is resistance from the current members — Kimmy Bass in particular is against the idea — Bobbi and Corky are added to the roster based on their overwhelming talent. Soon after, the cheerleaders are in a bus accident at Fear Street Cemetery; captain Jennifer Daly, who was flung from the vehicle, is found dead at the grave of Sarah Fear. Much to everyone’s shock though, Jennifer wakes up.
With Jennifer still recovering from her near death experience, Bobbi is promoted over Kimmy to team captain. This is when the squad and others connected to its members are beleaguered by a wicked, unseen force called “The Evil.” First up, popular jock Chip Chasner, Kimmy’s ex-boyfriend and Bobbi’s new love interest, suffers a mysterious ailment where his entire body freezes up during a game and is consequently hurt because of it. The same malady then affects Bobbi during a complicated floor routine, and as a result, Kimmy is injured.
The First Evil is a daring start to the series based on the sole fact that it kills off its own main character. Bobbi is the most foremost of the two Corcoran sisters until her horrific death; a school shower stall inexplicably fills with scalding water and drowns Bobbi. This crucial scene contains the first major hint of The Evil’s genesis. With Bobbi dead now, Corky takes over as the embattled, lead character for the next three books. Her first direct encounter with The Evil is where Corky confirms the spirit of Sarah Fear jumped out of her gravesite and possessed Jennifer’s corpse; the original team captain has been dead all along since the bus accident, and it was her who killed Bobbi and caused all of the other strange incidents. Once Corky forces Sarah’s ghost out of her and back into her grave, Jennifer’s body immediately decomposes. Corky and the other surviving cheerleaders assume the threat is over, but this is only the beginning of their nightmare.
The Second Evil sees Corky still coping with the loss of her sister as well as refusing to believe The Evil is gone. Her suspicions are exacerbated by the arrival of a suspicious and new character, grad student Sarah Beth Plummer, who not only provides important background information on Sarah Fear, she becomes a prominent red herring along with Jennifer’s troubled brother Jon. After Bobbi’s death and helping Corky exorcise The Evil from Jennifer, the other cheerleaders who originally disliked the Corcorans on principal rather than personally, are now trying their hardest to befriend and comfort Corky. Kimmy especially wants to mend her ways, which is why her turning out to be The Evil’s latest human husk for the last several months comes as a surprise. This is of course after Chip is found dead in shop class with his hand chopped off, and a labroom goes full Evil Dead 2 on Corky.
The second book supplies readers with exposition on central antagonist Sarah Fear, who perished in a boating accident in Fear Lake in 1899 — the water of which boiled much like the shower that killed Bobbi. This tidbit establishes The Evil’s Achilles’ heel is indeed water, and the element is what it takes to expel the spirit from those possessed. Fortunately, Corky saves Kimmy without killing her, but The Evil’s whereabouts are unaccounted for after it disappears down a drain. And leaving room open for the final installment in the original trilogy is the foreboding and anonymous note Corky receives at the end — “IT CAN’T BE DROWNED.”
The trilogy comes to an ostensible end with The Third Evil. With each new book so far, the possessions have become more intimate — first Jennifer, the only person who was kind to the Corcorans when they joined the team, and then Kimmy, Corky’s new friend. This time around, Corky suspects the squad’s newest member Hannah is The Evil’s next vessel. Yet it is at cheerleading camp where Corky realizes the bratty Hannah is not Sarah Fear incarnate; she is.
This spectral reworking of the “the calls are coming from inside the house” idea is a clever way of richly exploring the past. With her now housing Sarah Fear’s tortured essence and soul, Corky both battles the urge to kill her friends and relives her uninvited guest’s last few days alive. These visceral flashbacks to 1899, where Corky stands in for Sarah, go into greater detail about the events Sarah Beth spoke of in The Second Evil. In addition to witnessing firsthand how Sarah Fear killed her victims, Corky learns how to stop the spirit once and for all; she has to take her own life. At a high cliff called River Ridge that stands above the fictional Conononka River, Corky jumps into the water below. Luckily for her, Kimmy is there to return the favor from the last book and resuscitates Corky. Stine possibly wrote this book with the intention of it being the last in the trilogy — he even provides a sentimental scene where Corky sees Bobbi’s smiling image in the water’s reflection — but two years later, The Evil returns to finish what it started.
The popularity of this series led to a fourth book called The New Evil. With this being a Fear Street Super Chiller, the page count is higher than usual, and the characterization is more developed. Corky still cannot fathom The Evil being out of their lives, and it is because of her paranoia and trauma that Sarah Fear is resurrected again. The river where Corky banished the ghost has since iced over and is now the place of her return. Thinking they can summon a spirit to protect them from any future harm, Corky and her friends, Kimmy and Debra, perform the spell without realizing the harm; because the basketball team and the other cheerleaders were skating on the ice at the time of the ritual, Sarah Fear’s spirit goes inside all of them. This leads to a terrifying denouement at an away game where the zombie-like and possessed students rally and kill Kimmy. Desperate to exorcise everyone and avenge her friend, Corky drives a bus full of Sarah’s victims into the icy water at the bottom of River Ridge.
The New Evil does not retain its bleak ending for too long because Stine found a way to avoid the mass amount of teen fatalities. The students possessed by Sarah Fear do not die as expected; they are all pulled out by nearby fishermen, and the freezing water is miraculously warmed up from the heat generated by a large-scale exorcism. Despite the ending’s plot conveniences and Kimmy’s sad demise, this would have been a satisfactory swan song for the Cheerleaders series. As things always go in Shadyside, evil never dies.
The original Super Chiller line concluded with 1998’s The Evil Lives! This is the last Cheerleaders story set in the current timeline, and unlike the last four books, Corky is not physically present. A brand-new squad discovers a box containing The Evil itself and a written warning, from Corky, to anyone who dares to open it. The presence of the box would suggest something else had happened in the interim between The New Evil and this book. Now though, refusing to heed Corky’s note and treating the mysterious cheerleader deaths of yesteryear as the stuff of urban legends, Amanda Roberts and her pals do themselves no favors and open the box.
The Evil Lives! came out after the tenth volume in the Fear Street Sagas, The Awakening Evil. This 1997 book is set in the past and describes in detail how Sarah Fear died. The two novels both touch on the fact that Sarah Fear, née Burns, is really Jane Hardy — best friends Sarah and Jane switched lives. Sarah, wanting to travel the world, was engaged against her wishes to a man she had never met before. She then convinced Jane to take her place since she was looking to get married anyway. As Sarah’s ship to London sank and killed everyone aboard, Jane arrived in Shadyside so she could marry her betrothed, Thomas Fear. Sarah did not go gently, seeing as her vengeful spirit found its way to Jane and her loved ones. Using Jane’s body as her tool, Sarah killed several people; she poisoned Thomas with arsenic, she drowned a police officer in a pot of boiling water, she crushed a foreman’s head using grinding wheels, and she lopped off Thomas’ friend’s leg like she did with Chip’s hand in The Second Evil.
As mentioned before, Sarah drowned in Fear Lake, the body of water behind the Fear Mansion that burned down in 1900. Yet it was Jane who really died; she sacrificed herself to stop Sarah’s bloodshed. Unfortunately, Sarah’s spirit did not simply vanish just because Jane was deceased — she was merely trapped inside Jane’s corpse until Jennifer Daly fell onto her gravesite all those years later.
The Evil Lives! and The Awakening Evil are both rewarding explorations of Sarah Fear’s straight descent to villainy, but the latter is especially worthwhile, detailed, and gruesome. Ghostwriter Eric Weiner captures the past events with a sort of grisly grace that makes it unique among the Cheerleaders series. Meanwhile, The Evil Lives! finishes with a cliffhanger, so another book could have offered closure.
With its discernible Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II vibes and bevy of abrupt twists, the Cheerleaders collection still holds up after all these years. Fans would undoubtedly appreciate a proper on-screen adaptation, and with horror sorely lacking in cheerleading stories, there is no better place to find inspiration than Fear Street.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3672544/fear-street-r-l-stines-gruesome-cheerleaders-saga-full-evil-spirit/
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