Fear (1996)

Fear arrives from 1996, a year when the teen thriller still believed in the simple pleasures of a handsome stranger with a short fuse. James Foley directs Mark Wahlberg as David McCall, a charming drifter who courts sixteen-year-old Nicole Walker, played by Reese Witherspoon, then reveals himself as a possessive sociopath with a shrine in his bedroom and a gang of friends willing to help him storm a gated house. Producer Brian Grazer called it Fatal Attraction for teens, an accurate inventory of its ambitions. It wants to thrill. It wants to make fathers in the audience check the locks. It does not want to teach anyone anything, and it never pretends otherwise.

The one thread worth pulling is the courtship itself, which depicts a young woman trapped by an abusive boyfriend and eventually rescued by her father. That material carries a faint charge of gender politics, but the film treats it as a horror set piece, not an argument. The camera lingers on the menace, the violence escalates toward a beheaded family dog, and the resolution hands the girl a peace pipe and a dead suitor. Whatever commentary exists here is accidental, and nobody involved seems interested in pursuing it. Witherspoon later said she had to request a stunt double for the roller coaster scene, which tells us more about the production's priorities than any of its dialogue.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. The cast is uniformly white and the film makes no gesture toward anything else. Race is not a subject. Neither is climate, nor class, nor disability, nor any historical record in need of correction. The Walkers are wealthy and sympathetic, so the money on display is never a target. What remains is a lean, junky piece of nineties pulp, well cast and shamelessly staged, and about as socially conscious as a roller coaster. A vintage that pairs poorly with reflection and goes down easily enough on a Friday night.