Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?

As Dorothy answered Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, so could the much-maligned Sarah Fier of Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy say, “I’m not a witch at all.”

Fear Street: Part Three – 1666, the final film in a series based on books for teens by author R. L. Stine, is anchored in the past as it tells the origin of the curse that haunts the town of Shadyside, Ohio, spelled out in the first two movies set in 1994 and 1978. It also returns to the original group of teens as they conspire to end that curse and whoever is responsible for it.

In the first outing, Deena (Kiana Medeira), her brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.) and Deena’s girlfriend Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) were the only survivors of a band of unstoppable horror movie-style serial killers out for Sam’s blood. They believed the witch Sarah Fier was responsible and only by stopping her could they stop the killers preying on them.

In the second movie, they met Ziggy (Gillian Jacobs) who recounted what she learned at camp back in 1978 – that underneath Shadyside there lies a series of catacombs and tunnels where the witch practiced black magic, carving the names of her victims on a wall, leading them to become deathless murderers. Ziggy and her sister (who doesn’t survive the encounter) believe that by reuniting the bones of Sarah’s severed hand with the rest of her body, the witch will finally be at rest.

The sisters aren’t able to do that in 1978, but in 1994 Deena does that, only to immediately be plunged into the past, inhabiting the body of Sarah Fier, seeing things through her eyes and living our her life with her brother, father, and her betrothed, Solomon Goode (Ashley Zukerman), whom she sees as a friend even though she has no romantic interest in him.

Now living as Sarah in an early settlement upon which Shadyside and Sunnyvale would grow, Deena encounters many familiar faces from the first two films who are also now inhabiting new people. They include Hannah Miller (Olivia Scott Welch), Henry (Flores), Lizzie (Julia Rehwald), Abigail (Emily Rudd), Constance (Sadie Sink) and more actors from the first two movies playing puritan-era settlement citizens.

Strange things, including the preacher going insane and murdering a dozen or so of the settlement’s young people, along with other unnatural occurrences, start happening, and the townsfolk are desperate to have something to blame them on. When a secret romance between Sarah and Hannah, obviously unacceptable in the highly religious society, is discovered, it is serves as all the excuse they need to accuse both girls of being witches who are cursing the community.

The actual witch, one with the book of spells, lives outside of town in an encampment. Sarah gets a glimpse of the book, which has incantations for summoning demons, but does not take it. Someone else does though, and that person is the real source of all the evil haunting Shadyside for generations.

After battling the real perpetrator, Sarah is hanged as a witch, returning Deena to the present. She swiftly concludes that she and her friends, along with Ziggy, have to vanquish the ancestor of that original witch to end all the evil in town. That entails an elaborate scheme, set at the mall where the story began.

The final act is a lot of fun, as the good guys in the story set up elaborate, glow-in-the-dark traps for both the band of killers and the final boss. The kills in this movie are gory enough, but not in an exploitative way; the scares are genuine because having stuck through three films with these characters, we genuinely care about them. Sure, once back in the 1990s, the soundtrack revs back up giving us songs from Oasis, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and two Pixies songs. But it works here, especially in the climactic fight scene set to “Come Out and Play” by The Offspring.

Don’t skip part three, if you’ve stuck it out for the first two movies. If you haven’t watched any yet, binge them all together. The story is much more satisfying that way.